By Jordan Massey
Adam Bova has been involved in the film industry for about 15 years, initially beginning his journey in 2010 after moving to Virginia Beach, Va., to pursue his Master of Fine Arts in Directing Cinema and Television at Regent University. Despite having this degree in directing, Bova stated that he has not gotten the opportunity to direct any projects himself throughout his career.
“I’ve actually done a whole lot more producing, assistant directing, sound editing, that kind of thing,” said Bova, as opposed to directing his own pieces. His experience on-set began when he started booking sound gigs while still in graduate school, working on a few television projects for the Discovery Channel and Investigation Discovery, as well as a few one-day projects that came through the Virginia-Washington D.C. area. It was also during this time that Bova booked a job working on the Netflix series Afflicted, where his duties consisted of running sound for one of the units for one of the people they were following during the progression of the show.
Bova remained in the area for about a decade before eventually feeling that the Virginia Production Alliance and state legislature failed to live up to promises to increase tax credit film caps for filmmakers across the state of Virginia. “I listened to that for 10 years, I gave them 10 years,” he added. “So we decided to move down here to Georgia, because the industry is so much larger here than it is in Virginia.”
After looking at a couple of different teaching opportunities available in Georgia, Bova and his wife eventually moved to Columbus.
The Kansas City, Missouri-native landed a position at Columbus State University as an assistant professor for film and production courses, as well as social media. Since moving to Columbus, Bova has found that there’s a lot of potential in the city for local filmmakers, especially due to the support of the Columbus Film Office.
“Not only have [the Columbus Film Office] secured a rather large endowment to help feature films that are coming into the area to offset some of those costs between filming in Atlanta and filming in Columbus,” Bova stated. “But they’re also starting to experiment with supporting local filmmakers and the local community and everything.”
The contributed to Bova’s filmmaking endeavors, with him being a recipient of about $10,000 from the 2024 Local Filmmakers grant for the project Skinny Love (working title), which is now in post-production under the title Before We Knew. Bova stated that the project also received additional grants from CSU and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), where the director of the project is a faculty member.
“It was really important to us to bring on students to work on this project,” he added. “To give them opportunities to dive into roles in this industry that most students don’t have access to.”
Bova praised organizations across the state, such as the Georgia Film Academy, which provide students the opportunities to work on film sets. “GFA is great because they place you all over these blockbuster, Hollywood films, which is awesome,” said Bova. “But, there’s also opportunities for smaller productions and that’s what we were wanting to kind of pilot with this film, is to work on the model of these public and private partnerships where we could bring students on to set.”
Bova stated that students from CSU and UALR worked on the production as gaffers and sound technicians, with a few also working as production assistants. He added that another student advanced to the role of script supervisor, something he describes as “nearly unheard of,” but still a possibility with independent productions because they don’t have the same obligations to union roles.
One of the leads from this project was from Georgia and another lead was based in Florida. Bova added that many secondary characters were also portrayed by residents of Georgia, so this project was able to support the local acting community as well, over the month that it was filmed last summer.
In his work, Bova tries to focus on productions that have a strong component of fatherhood and what is takes to be a man or father, while also adding in the component of being in an intimate relationship from that perspective. He’s experimented with this in the projects he’s been involved in such as A Place Called Home (themes involving spousal loss, single fatherhood, pride), Before We Knew (themes involving young love, sacrifice, pain), and The Farm (themes involving infertility, managing stressors, love and loss), often telling these stories from a small-town, rural perspective.
Bova grew up outside of a small town with about 1,000 people, adding that he lived on 15 acres of land with his family. “We had goats, chickens, farm, you know all that kind of stuff,” he said. “So it’s like Hollywood thinks they know what small towns are, but you can tell that the best they’ve probably done is visited one for a short time. There’s just such a richness of characters and a raw honesty surrounding a lot of small town people and characters, and that’s what I love exploring.”
Bova is currently working on two documentaries with the CSU Department of Communication. He stated that one documentary is in very early pre-production right now, but the second documentary is currently in the middle of production and will focus around the city of Columbus.
As the post-production phase for Before We Knew progresses, Bova is looking forward to stepping into his producer role, consisting of working towards starting a festival run and exploring options for distribution.
“I really do think the future of video entertainment is really going to be in small, local communities. There will always be a place for Hollywood, always: they can tell the big, grand, the wow stories and everything,” Bova added. “But with YouTube, with Amazon streaming, with all of these other avenues that are now open for filmmakers and due to the fracture of the audience, I think video entertainment is going to move more towards the small, local community-based stories and creatives.”
