CREATIVE PASSION- FEATURE FILM

In the course of my tenure as a part time student, I was asked by my brother to write a screen play and help out with making a movie based upon a story idea he had of doing a low budget action film. He sold his motorcycle and bought a really nice digital film camera. We had a friend who went to a film school for special effects and we had a bunch of other friends with all kinds of different skills that could help out. I fleshed out the script in less than a month and we were off to the races. We did location scouting (places we would have easy access to without paying for it), casting (friends, co-workers, family, and fools), and wrangled together all the equipment we could find.

We had no idea what we were getting into.

Our first weekend of filming, we spent all night shooting a single walking scene and conversation between two characters. Five hours of shooting for three minutes of story time. We went back to the “studio” to look at the footage and realized all of the shots had a boom mic in them. We weren’t discouraged. We learned from our mistakes and went out the very next weekend and shot the scene again. This time in only three hours. My cousin (one of the aforementioned family we roped into helping us) said he knew we were for real when he saw how seriously we took this.

We were serious enough to do this weekend warrior film making venture for the next four years. We had the tiniest of budgets and no experience in any of our people, but we didn’t care. We all had a passion for this film and we all put everything into it. We had DVDs made and we had an opening premiere at the Boston University campus theater that we sold tickets to our vast network of friends, co-workers, family, and fools.

After all that work, all the ups and downs and sweat and tears, all the debate and arguments and triumphs and adversity overcome; we made something we thought was amazing. Here we come film world. Lookout! The next great film makers were here to take independent film making by storm!

Silence.

Nobody came knocking our doors. No one in our group of film maker friends got a call from Hollywood asking us to help with the next Oscar nominated master piece.

No matter, we went on to planning our next film. This time we’ll do a short film that we can enter into those artsy festivals we keep hearing about.

Who in their right mind starts there film making careers by shooting a full length action film anyway?

If you have any interest in seeing this premier work of Mindbeside Studios, here is the link:

Warnings for violence, language and plenty of novice film maker mistakes.

Looking back, it’s very B level, very low tech, and not the work of art we had hoped. But the passion is there…

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Jarrod

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