Teachers and school committee members came. Family and friends. Artists and strangers.

People filled each chair, stood against the walls, made room on the floor and ducked out of the way of others. 

On any given day, the quaint Lewiston coffeehouse serves lunch to a dozen or so independent minds. But not on this day. The inaugural Lewiston-Auburn Film Festival was in town and a large crowd gathered to see what Taylor McIntosh had been up to.  

“It was great to see all those people,” said McIntosh, a student filmmaker who has bounced between Auburn, Rockport and Keene, N.H., since graduating from Edward Little High School in 2007.

“I have always loved the idea of film,” said McIntosh, who credits his mother’s picture taking as the foundation for his chosen path. “She was always taking pictures of the family,” McIntosh said. “Mom gave me my first camera,” he said, and he still shoots photographs with an identical camera, a manual Minolta built in 1958. “I like how simple everything is. Down to the bare bones,” McIntosh said about older-style mechanical cameras.

Simple, bare-bones could describe McIntosh’s recent success. His film “Motion Picture” won the People’s Choice Award for best experimental film during the L-A Film Festival. The film takes a look at how a picture frame can change the appearance of a mundane subject. “A film can be anything you want it to be and there will always be an audience for that film,” McIntosh said. 

“We did not know what to expect from local filmmakers,” said film festival board member Joshua Shea, who screened McIntosh’s submissions before the festival. “Wow, this is just a college kid,” was Shea’s  thought while viewing “Ella,” a visual letter to McIntosh’s 6-year-old adopted sister. Shea remembers the festival organizers words exactly: “We need to get this kid involved in the festival immediately because he is that good.”

“It did not surprise me one bit when he won,” Shea said. 

Like so many artists, the 22-year-old filmmaker’s success has not followed a straight path. As a young student, McIntosh admits the structured concept of school did not appeal to his ability. “Taylor arrived at EL a little hostile, a little insecure and all ready to rebel against something … he just didn’t know what to rebel against,” McIntosh’s high school pottery teacher Richard Dahlquist said.

McIntosh’s mother called Dahlquist about an incident her son was involved in at school, but the art teacher reassured her. “Oh, he’s a rebel all right but I don’t think you need to worry,” Dahlquist said to Taylor’s mom. “I think what he got from me was that there was something about this art thing … and he liked it,” Dahlquist said.

“They changed the way I was thinking about things,” McIntosh said of Dahlquist and Shawn Rice, also an art teacher at EL. “I got zoned in when they were talking,” McIntosh said of his art teachers. “Rice had a really big impact on me. Dahlquist too.” 

McIntosh graduated in May from Keene State College with a degree in film production. He is working in Rockland as a teaching assistant at the Maine Media Workshops while living in his grandmother’s basement for the summer.

Shea is hoping McIntosh will submit work for the 2012 L-A Film Festival. That will happen if McIntosh’s current project gets finished in time. The 30- to 40-minute film will involve four vignettes, one for each season. The spring segment is shot and edited and McIntosh is currently working on the summer footage. “It’s kind of a slow project,” McIntosh said.

“I thought it was really, really good,” McIntosh said of Lewiston and Auburn’s first film festival. “It was great for the community. I think the important thing is for the community to support it.  The key ingredient is the audience — and the films of course,” McIntosh said.