On a cold Saturday night in Portsmouth, the marquee at Portsmouth 8 Cinema won’t be advertising a superhero sequel. It’ll be flashing a title that sounds like a punk mixtape : Rat Songs, a locally made dramedy that takes a hard look at what can happen when three East End kids set out on a simple mission—get high at a friend’s house—and find themselves staring down a reality that’s less “party night” and more “this is why people don’t make eye contact at the gas station.”
The premiere is Saturday, Feb. 21 at Portsmouth 8 Cinema. Seating begins at 6 p.m., the film starts at 7 p.m., and admission is $5. And just to be crystal clear: this movie is VERY rated R—no children will be permitted.
It’s the kind of hometown event that feels half movie premiere, half community pulse-check. And if you ask Vincent Herman editor, assistant director, director of photography, and one of the driving forces behind local indie outfit Subject To Change Entertainment, that mix is the whole point.
“Rat Songs is a true-to-life dramedy about three overlooked and written off youth on the East End of Portsmouth,” Herman says. “And what happens to them when their plans are derailed by unfortunate circumstances that are sadly all too well known to many.”
In other words: it’s funny—until it isn’t. And then it’s funny again, because sometimes that’s the only way you survive a place that keeps handing you reasons not to.
The headline that wouldn’t die
Herman is the first to admit he has a bone to pick with local coverage that latched onto the most sensational detail in the film’s orbit: a now-infamous topless casting call that, depending on who you ask, was either bold, ridiculous, misguided, or a masterclass in the internet doing what the internet does.
He doesn’t deny it happened. He just hates that it became the story.
“I was highly entertained by the whole thing,” he says, laughing—because of course he is. “Despite the clickbait title… and it getting a couple of slight details wrong about our company and never mentioning the writer/director of the film, I thought it was a really nice and fairly well researched write up… and did a good job at moving on quickly from the sensationalism…”
Then he adds the line that says everything about how indie filmmaking works in small towns: you take what you can get, you keep moving, and you don’t let the comment section drive the car.
“The response… was pretty negative, but when that negativity is purely from just reading the title… it was pretty easy to disregard.”
If anything, he says, it became a weirdly useful stress test—one that exposed how quickly people form opinions about art they haven’t seen, and how fast a rumor can scare off a participant.
He thinks it spooked an early casting choice. But the universe, as it tends to in scrappy productions, rerouted the situation into something better.
“It turns out that that worked out in our favor,” Herman says. The role reshuffled. New performers stepped in. A poet from Dayton—Dan Denton—finally fit into the project, along with his partner. The film gained what Herman calls “a great comedic element.” The timing clicked, the motel stay lined up, and the intimacy coordinator was available.
“So it all worked out perfectly,” he says, and you can hear the relief under the humor. In indie film, “perfectly” doesn’t mean flawless. It means it got done.
Not a childhood dream—until it was
Herman didn’t grow up announcing he’d be a filmmaker. He grew up trying to get out of his own head.
“Growing up, films and TV were a great escape from a turbulent home life,” he says. “But nothing would take me away like running around the woods with friends and telling new stories while playing our favorite characters…”
If that sounds like the beginning of a director origin story, it is. Herman’s path to filmmaking runs through the kinds of creative detours that only make sense when you look back: action figures staging “epic adventures,” the obsession with performance that led him first toward professional wrestling, and then to the realization that what he loved wasn’t the athletics—it was the storytelling.
That thread pulled him into local theater. A troupe run by Lorri Tipton and Jim Hayes needed someone who could take a fall in a black box production of As You Like It. Tipton knew Herman had been studying wrestling and making Jackass-style VHS tapes with her son and friends—translation: he could commit to a stunt and not panic.
“It was quickly after that I realized what I loved about wrestling so much was the performance aspect… and theatre was a way to do that in spades,” he says.
The Portsmouth Little Theatre pipeline led to unfinished projects, a TV pilot called Magic Makers, and the early YouTube era—when “content” wasn’t an industry term yet and comedy sketches were something you made because you were bored and thought your friends were funny.
Then adulthood happened. The jobs. The grind. The “this can’t be it” feeling.
On a whim—one that reads like both a breakdown and a breakthrough—Herman bought a camera for $900.
And then, for a while, he did nothing with it.
Not until the pandemic, when boredom and isolation turned the camera from an expensive guilt object into a lifeline. He made a sketch. Then another. Then he called his brother, Travis Herman (of Creative Jargon) with a decade-old idea: make a “Sweded” movie—those deliberately low-budget, lovingly ridiculous recreations made famous by Be Kind Rewind.
Travis said yes. The idea ballooned. They made Sweded Die Hard on a scale bigger than Herman expected. Donations rolled in. The momentum helped launch Subject To Change Entertainment “proper,” as Herman puts it.
But the moment that sealed it wasn’t a camera purchase or a crowdfunding milestone.
It was the sound of an audience reacting.
“It was sitting in that theater, watching that movie with a room full of people and hearing their reactions—THAT’S when I knew I was going to be a filmmaker,” he says.
The film that hit too close to home
Rat Songs isn’t Herman’s first rodeo, but it is the first time he stepped into a major project without writing or directing—the usual pattern for his work.
This one belongs to writer-director C.D. Bailey, who brought Herman an early version that was, in Herman’s words, “very unrefined.” But something about the idea—and more importantly, the characters—stuck.
Herman told Bailey to keep working.
Two years later, a new script landed.
“I was blown away how much I liked it,” Herman says. “The nature of it hadn’t changed, but the events in it had in a way that made it so relatable. I knew these characters.”
That’s the key to Rat Songs: it doesn’t gawk at Portsmouth. It doesn’t treat “the wrong side of town” like a setting for outsiders to point at. It treats it like home—messy, funny, tender, brutal, and full of people whose stories get dismissed until something awful happens and everyone suddenly wants to know why nobody did anything sooner.
“Even though it was a work of fiction, I knew I was reading something true,” Herman says.
From there, he did what producers in small towns do: he became the infrastructure.
“More than a Producer, I was the Assistant Director, Director of Photography, and Editor on the project.” If past projects were tiny crews by necessity, Rat Songs demanded something bigger—because you can’t make a film like this with three exhausted people and a prayer, not if you want it to land the way it needs to land.
“I knew this one was gonna be a bigger undertaking than all of those combined,” he says. “And for that I was going to need a bigger team if I personally wanted to survive it.”
The crew list is long, and Herman says it like gratitude is part of the job description: Kayla Holbrook, Randi Blankenship, Travis Herman, Jerry Mann, and more, plus local businesses that helped anchor the production—The Blue Store (Fast Stop Carryout) and Dari Creme among them.
“This was nothing if not a community effort,” Herman says. “C.D. wrote and directed it, I filmed the whole thing and ran the set/crew, but it can not be said enough that we didn’t make this film alone.”
The van, the storage unit, and the part nobody glamorizes
In 2023, Herman launched a GoFundMe with a title that sounds like either a joke or a manifesto: Moving Into a Van to Make Movies.
It wasn’t performative. It was survival math.
“For me, it was a GREAT decision!” Herman says. “I’m the type of person that… when I feel backed into a corner… I will have no problem making a bold move… with proper thought put into it, of course.”
He’d lived in his vehicle before—multiple times. This was the first time he did it with a dream attached. He planned. He kept a storage unit (which, he insists, is the unsexy pro tip nobody talks about).
“So, if I have any solid advice in that regard, it’s to get a storage unit!” he says, half-laughing, half-dead serious.
It’s the kind of detail that makes Herman’s story ring true: not the “believe in yourself” poster version, but the version where the dream has receipts and the plan includes where to keep your winter coats.
And when he talks about what he wants people to take from his work, he refuses to be the guy who says “just do it” and disappears into a fog machine.
“I don’t wanna be another guy vaguely saying ‘just get out there and do it,’” he says. “The simple part is deciding to do it, but from there, it’s not going to be easy… You HAVE to be willing to do the work and have a level head about expectations.”
Then he says the truest thing any artist can say out loud:
“If the first thing you make sucks, GOOD!” he says. “You can look at that and ask ‘where did I go wrong’ and improve… You’re supposed to always be learning.”
Why You Should Go to the Premiere
Small-town films don’t get big-city safety nets. There’s no streaming deal waiting in the wings to validate the effort. There’s only the work—and whether the community shows up.
Herman isn’t asking people to come for spectacle. He’s asking them to come for recognition: of a place, of people, of stories that are usually flattened into statistics or stereotypes.
“It is a confronting tale about things that actually happen… not just here in Portsmouth, but in towns and cities all over America, big or small,” he says.
So yes: come support a local filmmaker. Come support a local production company that’s doing the impossible with duct tape, stubbornness, and talent.
But also come because Rat Songs is aiming at something bigger than “look what we made.” It’s aiming at “look what we live with.”
And sometimes the only way to start a real conversation is to sit in a dark theater with your neighbors and watch the truth—funny, ugly, and familiar—play out on a screen.
Premiere details
Rat Songs — Premiere Screening
Where: Portsmouth 8 Cinema, Portsmouth, Ohio
When: Saturday, February 21
Seating: 6:00 PM
Showtime: 7:00 PM
Admission: $5
Rating: VERY Rated R — No children admitted
