Wells student Mark Ketola is going to run all the way to Sundance.

Ketola, 25, is currently editing “Somethings Lost,” a feature-length drama about a sprinter who faces the loss of his livelihood when he suffers a serious injury to his Achilles tendon. As he adjusts to a life off the track, the sprinter meets and grows attracted to a woman.

“I wanted to emphasize the element of luck happening to us,” Ketola said. “But we're so caught up in bad luck, we ignore the good luck we have.”

After imagining the idea late last summer, the Locke resident penned the script with a personal misfortune motivating its theme.

“It's a normal story going backwards,” Ketola said. “Usually the hero is an extraordinary guy at the end of the story, but I wanted to take an extraordinary guy back to normal and explore how he deals with it.”

Choosing a sprinter as the vessel of that theme was a matter of value. Running, Ketola said, is easy to film. He set several of the movie's scenes in college because securing shoots at Ithaca, Wells and Tompkins Cortland Community campuses was no challenge either.

Some roles were filled by friends like Joel DeMartino, as Daren's friend, and Duane Weed, who portrays an antagonist sprinter named Jack Cramer.

Through the Internet, Ketola could cherry-pick interested parties to complete the cast. He used Craig's List to find Sharlota Kay to portray the love interest, Victoria, and Nick Marcucci to star as sprinter Mitchell Burbank.

“I fell in love with the character,” Marcucci said. “There's not a lot of dialogue, which is great, because that forced me to act in ways I've never done and build this character out of my body.”

Burbank's trainer, Coach Caplin, was portrayed by Glynn Praesel, who contacted Ketola after reading about “Lost” on the Internet Movie Database message board. Praesel, who is currently filming with Burt Reynolds in California, volunteered to fly himself to central New York from Texas for Ketola's shoot. Like the rest of the cast and crew, Praesel also worked for free based solely on their reading of Ketola's script.

As a director, Ketola took inspiration from the low-budget approach of Edward Burns (“She's the One”). Two-thirds of the $12,000 budget of “Lost” consisted of the high definition camera Ketola purchased to film it.

“Basically, I forked over a lot of my own cash, and I'm broke now,” he said.

With a skeleton crew of a cameraman, makeup artist and part-time sound and lighting technicians, Ketola pulled his cast through a production schedule of 20 12-hour days ending July 20. Each shot was filmed at least four times because Ketola prefers to first let his actors perform their own interpretation of their part, improvising if they please.

“Even if things look kind of dark and you're in the shadow, there's some sort of encompassing idea he's working toward. And that's comforting to know,” Marcucci said. “He's an actor's director.”

Ketola then asks his actors to play a scene as he wrote it in the script in order to provide himself with a full plate of options in the editing studio. With other scenes calling for digitally added extras, post-production has improved the technical acumen of Ketola, who majors in computer science.

“When he calls the help desk at (Wells), he ends up telling them what to do,” said Sandy Ketola, Mark's mother.

While the creative process is a pleasure for Ketola, the preparation was a consistent headache. To ensure that he could realize each scene as he had imagined it, Ketola oversaw the scheduling of cast and crew, the securing of locations at which they filmed and the presence of props and costumes that would be seen. Elements like police uniforms for officer characters demanded a rigid attention to detail. Mark's mother is not surprised he persevered.

“He just grabs a hold of something and he goes for it,” she said.

The challenge was sharpest during the 100-meter race scenes at the Ithaca College and Southern Cayuga High School tracks. In 95-degree heat, a mixture of real sprinters and actors were required to run the same race about 30 times over the course of filming.

“Everyone was pretty much dying on the track,” Ketola said.

Though problematic, these parts of the production cycle are accepted by Ketola as necessary evils.

“No matter what you do, it becomes work in the end,” he said. “There are definite points of drudgery, but I fell in love with manipulating the camera.”

Ketola discovered this love when he was 18 and his neighbor, Seth Donald, received a VHS camera for Christmas and used it to film a five-minute movie with some friends. When he saw the film, Ketola felt he could do better. Then an aspiring novelist, he parlayed his love of storytelling into his first attempt at cinema.

“There's no value in a book that doesn't have a strong narrative, because we can always film it better,” he said.

Ketola's first production evolved into a feature-length medieval farce similar to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” featuring digital lightning and dragon special effects he designed. After writing the script, Ketola became the default director, he said.

“If we had picked a smaller project, we probably would have quit,” he said. “But as a result, we changed the careers of five people I know.”

Donald went on to work in Hollywood, and Ketola is preparing his first Sundance Film Festival entry in “Lost.” With it buoying his resume, Ketola hopes to have a bigger budget for his next film, which he is currently writing. However “Lost” fares, the director is confident he'll work in this town again.

“I got actors to come in from all over the country with no resume,” he said. “Everything I've done is a stepping stone; hopefully it's growing larger.”

Staff writer David Wilcox can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net