"Lights... camera... ACTION!" At the Houston International Table Tennis Academy (HITTA), all three of these elements were recently in play. The lights and camera came courtesy of 17-year-old Henry Segal, a high school student with a passion for cinema. Segal cites "Rushmore" by Wes Anderson, his Houston homeboy, as his favorite movie. Tasked with making a short for his advanced filmmaking class, Segal decided to check out the local table tennis scene. "I just Googled ‘table tennis in Houston’ and this was the first place that came up, the Houston International Table Tennis Academy," explains Segal. "I just drove there without a camera and spent a few hours talking with the coaches, parents, kids… One of the coaches, when I was leaving, said, 'You should come back Thursday night. We have the best five-year-old. You have to see this kid.'" As it turned out, the kid in question provided more than enough of the requisite action. Wunderkind Allen Mao (pictured) is already generating a buzz as the next big thing in US table tennis. The result of their meeting was "Little Big Shot," a three-minute documentary chronicling Mao's thrice-weekly training regimen at HITTA. Expertly shot and edited, shots fly by to the rhythm of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." "I'm Allen and I'm five," says Mao before nonchalantly laying out his career goals: "I want to be a professional table tennis player." According to Manny Velazquez, general manager at HITTA, Mao is more than equal to the task. "That kid is a special talent," says Velazquez. "He has the potential to be a national champion. He plays with love, he's always smiling, he's very attentive, he focuses on what he's been told, incredibly at five years old." As a result of the serendipitous meeting, Segal won the Best Documentary prize at the Pegasus Film Festival, which dubs itself the "Largest student-run film festival in the country." Available for viewing on YouTube, "Little Big Shot" will also reach a wider audience at the Austin Film Festival this October 23. Despite the obvious differences between sport and cinema, the confluence of disparate disciplines may reveal parallel undercurrents. Table tennis players and filmmakers each must compile a stunning sequence of shots in order to be successful. Like magicians, both manipulate the perceptions of their respective audiences, whether the moviegoing masses or a single opponent across the table. Like alchemy, the magical combination of lights, cameras and action have combined to produce not one but two gold mines. In the process of illuminating Allen Mao's precocious talent, young filmmaker Henry Segal has also announced his own. (As Wes Anderson would say, in his preciously idiosyncratic way, "That's a wrap.")

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