A local from LaGrange has gone from Callaway High to radio, to broadcast news, to Fort Benning and now to living his dream of making movies.
or Payton King, making movies has been a longtime dream
King is a graduate of the Callaway High Class of 2011. He grew up in the Hogansville-LaGrange area for most of his life. Having lived in Auburn, Alabama, for a while and now in Fort Benning, he says he still considers his hometown to be the Hogansville-LaGrange area, noting his mother still lives in LaGrange
After high school, King started working in radio in Opelika, Auburn, and later Columbus, where he did radio part-time as a radio DJ at iHeart Media at Rock 103. Eventually, King made his way into broadcast media when he went to work for WRBL, a local news station in Columbus, working behind the camera
“I worked there for about four years in their production unit as a nightly news editor. I worked a lot on their graphics. I ran cameras, and right around that time was when I started really gaining those abilities that are helping me now.”
From there, he went to Fort Benning, where he currently works in the public affairs office as the head of their video team, leading a team of four videographers
“We try to shoot all the training that’s going on in Fort Benning,” King said. “We stay busy on those kinds of things.”
King said his biggest project there was a short documentary for their YouTube page about the Moores when Fort Benning was renamed to Fort Moore for a brief time
“I made a short documentary on the Moore family and interviewed them,” King said. “That was probably the biggest filmmaking exercise I had done, and it took about six months to shoot and edit.”
Making movies has long been a dream, he said
“Since I was a kid, I’ve loved movies. I was a very hyperactive child, and the way that my parents got me to be still and let them do adult things was to get me to sit down and watch a movie, and that kind of carried on until when I was a young adult, when I could start to learn about the art form of it and understand that people made these these movies that I love so much,” King said
“I started trying to figure out what I could contribute to this art style and this medium. Both the art of filmmaking and the technical side of filmmaking engage me equally
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“It’s just always been part of my life, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” King said
King said the idea for the short film, “Give & Take,” came from a stop at a gas station
“I’m kind of an anxious, paranoid person,” King said. “I remember my significant other, Rebecca [Gossett], who’s the executive producer and co-writer on this film, went into a gas station, and I had this terrible thought: if something were to happen while she was inside the gas station, would I be able to help her?”
“Would I be able? What would I do? And you know, every guy thinks like, they’ll come in there and save the day, but I am a self-admitted idiot,” King said
The idea for the film is similar, where a couple in a bookstore are having a knockdown, drag-out fight, when the store is robbed
“Once the [boyfriend] realizes what’s going on, he realizes his phone’s dead. He can’t call the police, so now he has to do something, and he’s propelled to figure it out,” King said. “This is a comedy thriller. It’s a comedy because everybody in this movie is bad at what they’re trying
to do. The robber is a bad robber, the hostages are bad hostages, and the boyfriend savior is a bad savior.”
King said they got started on the project with a grant from the Columbus Film Commission, and they are currently running a campaign to add to those funds through a Kickstarter campaign
“We’re obviously going to submit to film festivals because that is where probably the highest concentration of cinephiles is going to be, but as far as distribution goes, this will definitely be something that at some point gets put on YouTube. We’re trying to build a swell of a community around that content to help fund the next one,” King said
“You see similarities now with the current success of ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms.’ Those guys started on YouTube building those communities,” King said. “Any filmmaker does nowadays with everything being so democratized and kind of decentralized. You want to build that community so that the next time you come out with a short film, you have a built-in audience, you have a built-in fundraising base that believes in you and believes in what you’re trying to make.”
Current plans are to begin shooting in January 2027, wrapping up the following February. Picture editing is expected to take another month, so they are shooting for an April 2027 release
To support the project, visitkickstarter.com/projects/officialgiveandtake/help-us-bring-give-and-take-to-life
