Nathan Gotsch

Nathan Gotsch grew up in Fort Wayne, IN, the oldest of three children. His father is a maxillofacial prosthodontist (dental specialist) and his mother a nurse who became a homemaker upon his birth in 1983. He attended both Lutheran grade school (St. Paul's, Fort Wayne, founded 1837) and high school (Concordia Lutheran High School, Fort Wayne, founded 1935). He began taking video classes in the spring of his freshman year of high school, which led to producing and hosting "Video Voice," a weekly half-hour show that the advanced video class at Concordia produced for Fort Wayne public access. He began doing short movies that aired periodically on the show toward the end of his sophomore year, but he did not become serious about filmmaking until his junior year, after he visited the film school at the University of Southern California during spring break. During his senior year, he submitted four films/videos to Project XL, a statewide arts competition for Indiana high school students. Three of his entries made it to the state finals in the video art category (ten entries were chosen for the state finals). His three entries took first, second, and third in the category (which led to a rules change for all subsequent competiton - no more than one state finalist entry per student per category) and the first place entry, A Change of Plans (2001), also took Best of Show as the top entry out of all six categories (writing, performance, 2-D art, 3-D art, original music, and video art). One of the Project XL judges, Mark Archer, producer of the critically-acclaimed In the Company of Men (1997), remarked that he assumed the cell phone in Gotsch's pocket that kept ringing as he went up to accept his awards (a practical joke played on him by his friends seated in the balcony of the auditorium) was a producer calling him about upcoming projects. Several weeks later, Gotsch was denied admittance to USC film school as a production major (his first choice), but had been admitted as a critical studies major (second choice). Before arriving on campus at the end of August 2001, he received another award for A Change of Plans (2001), the Jimmy Stewart Memorial Crystal Heart Award for Student Achievement from the Heartland Film Festival. His was the first student award to be given to a high school film. The irony of beating out 30 other college filmmakers (most graduate students) but being denied admission to USC's production program was not lost on Gotsch, especially after he learned that Academy Award-winning documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris, a professor at USC and the former head of the production program, was part of the Heartland judging panel that had awarded him the Crystal Heart.