 "Photo: Courtesy photo")
Junior Grant Rupe is a classic example of how one passion can interfere with the pursuit of another.
Rupe began his college career at K-State, the only place he wanted to be after growing up in a family that has traveled to K-State home football games since 1993. Both his parents graduated from K-State in the late 70s.
Rupe said his parents started “dragging me and my brother to games” when the two were young. “The last thing a six-year-old and a four-year-old want to do is drive two hours to watch K-State football,” Rupe said, referring to himself and his brother, Ross, now a sophomore at K-State.
The Rupes also took vacations with the team to attend bowl games. He said he did not appreciate the tradition as much as a kid, but looking back, he said it was valuable family time while growing up.
In late 2008, head coach Bill Snyder announced he would be returning as head coach of K-State football. Rupe said he was excited but had heard some negative comments from other people.
“The guy was obviously a savior at K-State,” Rupe said of Snyder. “The K-State fan base needed to remember what he did for K-State football.”
Rupe set out to remind them. He spent from mid-January of 2009 to early May working on a video, he said. He collected and organized footage from KAKE news station in Wichita and edited it. The video, “Snyderman Returns,” is about seven minutes long and has over 25,000 hits on YouTube.com.
“That video just gives us all goosebumps whenever we watch it,” said Matt Newman, senior in finance and a friend of Rupe.
So Rupe was raised to be a Wildcat. A problem arose, however, when he discovered what he actually wanted to do with his life: be a well-respected feature film director. K-State does not have a program in that area.
Rupe came anyway. He stayed for a year and a half with an undecided major and loved the school, but he realized staying would not help him toward his goal.
In middle school, he and one of his best friends, Alex Brand, who is now a senior in film production at the University of Kansas, started making movies on a digital camera after their summer plan for a lawn-mowing business fell through.
Rupe said it was something to keep them out of trouble. They messed around with a camera and then bought editing software, he said. That hobby quickly grew into a passion, one Rupe would not stray from all through high school.
He and Brand interned at the KAKE television station his senior year in high school and got to know Allen Shote, the sports director there. That would be important later on, as the connection there provided sports footage for “Snyderman Returns.” He also did an internship at Digital Brand in the summer of 2007. This past summer he went to California and interned at Southpaw Productions.
It was after the Digital Brand internship that Rupe knew what he had to do if he wanted to pursue filmmaking.
“I had to put away my animosity for KU and bite the bullet and do it,” he said.
He transferred to KU.
He got a lot of flak, and still does, from his K-State friends for making the switch. Newman said at first he told Rupe he could not be his friend anymore, as did most of his friends, but eventually they got used to it.
“He’s got to chase his dream, I guess,” Newman said. “If I were him I’d probably change dreams. I’d never go to KU.”
Of course, Rupe had vowed the same thing in a Collegian article years before.
“He hates going to KU,” Newman said. “I think he probably dies inside a little bit every time he’s at KU.”
Rupe is defiantly proud of the purple, wearing K-State apparel around campus on a regular basis. He said he gets lots of dirty looks and people make comments sometimes. Brand said he has a K-State license plate on his truck.
“He’ll rock it out in dangerous territory,” Newman said.
Rupe said he basically lives in Manhattan and goes to school in Lawrence. He said he comes back to Manhattan nearly every weekend and thinks of his education as studying abroad at the K-State campus in Lawrence.
“Absolutely no way has any part of the red and blue entered my blood,” Rupe said. “I never shy away in the face of opposition.”
As far as the future, while Rupe said he wants to stay around K-State forever, he does have a passion for directing and producing feature films. While he enjoyed his summer in California, he does not want to move out there, he said.
“I want to bring a little Hollywood to the Midwest,” he said.
