Published:
By Amy J. Barry
Last summer, four Central students set off on the ride of a lifetime, travelling across the country as competitors in the Great Race, a national 2,300-mile, cross-country competition. A new film by Central senior Molly Knybel goes behind the scenes (and the wheel) of Team Central’s travels.
Getting road-ready
The race calls for contestants to compete in antique and classic cars; Team Central hit the road in a green 1961 Dodge Lancer.
Three of the students — senior Nate Brelling and juniors Luke Vermilyea and Alex Distafano — reconditioned the car as members of the university’s Multi Powered Vehicle Club under the supervision of club advisor Dr. David Sianez, a professor of Technology & Engineering at Central.
“We changed, replaced everything we could without getting into the engine and transmission,” Sianez says. “It took about four months.”
The 2022 race began at Rocky Point State Park in Rhode Island and, 10 days later, ended in Fargo, North Dakota. The team never imagined they would make it to the finish line, let alone take home first place trophy in the X-Cup division made up of high school and college age student teams.
The fourth student was Knybel, a senior majoring in Psychology with a minor in Cinema Studies and Strategic Communications. Knybel was not only an active participant in every aspect of the journey, she also wrote and produced her first documentary: “Dodging Certainty: The Great Race 2022.” Knybel directed and narrated the film from the road and admits she wasn’t sure how or what it would look like in the end.
“The project was very unpredictable,” Knybel says. “I remember saying a year ago, ‘I don’t know what the challenges, the actual story, the final project will be.’ We had very low expectations going into it. I never thought we’d make it all the way to Fargo, and I’d be documenting it the whole way!”
Although the students anticipated much larger issues with the car, the extent of their problems was the speedometer going out twice — which they fixed — and a tire that wore out, which they replaced.
As the film’s narrator, Knybel had a lot of advance research to do, learning all the complex rules of the race and writing all the interview questions. To give the documentary a feeling of immediacy, she mounted GoPro cameras inside and outside the car to get a variety of angles.
A highlight of the trip Knybel documented was the team’s arrival in small towns across the country, where people eagerly waited on their front lawns for the racers to come by.
“They were cheering, they were so excited. It was crazy,” she says.
Her biggest challenge was editing about 500 hours of raw footage down to the final 45-minute film. Music selection and then syncing it with the film was another time-consuming task.
“I probably put as many hours into this documentary as the boys did working on the car,” she says.
Stellar support
Knybel is grateful for the support of faculty and staff at Central, without which she says she couldn’t have produced the documentary.
She says Scott Hazen, Student Activities director, travelled with the team in a separate vehicle, coordinating the stops, booking hotels, and making sure everything went as smoothly as possible.
She credits professors Karen Ritzenhoff and Brad Heck in the Department of Communications with guiding her throughout the entire process of creating the documentary.
Heck, who teaches film production and nonfiction filmmaking, started working with Knybel after she finished a solid draft of the documentary.
“Molly is remarkable,” Heck says. “She took very ambitious subject matter and had to tell the story while events were unfolding. There was a lot of information to communicate in a way that was compelling and wouldn’t zone-out the viewers. She did an exceptional job with the narrative arc of the story and putting it all together.”
In helping Knybel reframe the final work, he says, “We spent a lot of time with pacing — how do we build tension or raise the stakes? It effectively communicates the feeling of a community spread across the country and the students being a part of it as they go.”
Producing this documentary gave Knybel the confidence to pursue a film-related career after she graduates.
“I’ve always been passionate about film,” she says, “but film schools were outrageously expensive, and I thought it was a lost cause that I would ever go to one. Then I found out when I got here that Central had a minor in Film, and the professors and classes I’ve taken have been awesome and taught me so much.”
“Dodging Certainty” can be viewed on YouTube and at GreatRace.com.