THE TERM PAPER (1986)

This is a personal favorite of mine. My short film The Term Paper is about a college student who realizes, at midnight, that a major term paper is due the next morning.

This was based on a true story. My girlfriend at the time, Sue AmRhein, had to write a term paper. She started by using her electric typewriter (personal computers were available, but expensive... poor college kids didn't have them as they do today... boy I sound old!). The typewriter broke and she ended up having to finish it by handwriting it on lined paper. I took that experience, added about 10 more obstacles and story boarded the whole thing.


We actually shot this film on film! Super-8 silent to be exact. My brother, Paul, and his wife bought me a Super-8 camera as a present for getting accepted into the College of Fine Arts at UF. So, I story boarded out the story and bought the film. We shot it over a single weekend in June of 1986. I rented a couple of lights, but really had no idea what I was doing. Ended up we could have used only one of the lights, because it was so strong you couldn't see the effects of the other two lights on the film. Again, another lesson learned.

The end result is a 30-ish minute film, costing about $400.00, that still holds up today. Digitizing this project is a lot more lengthy, because the transfer to video has caused some color distortion. There's a company out there that does flicker-free digitization of films. I'm going to have this gem transferred to DVD soon.

Personal Note: At one point in the story, the Student kills a cockroach crawling across his dining room table by dousing the creature in an immense, non-stop shower of bug spray. Moments later, his cigarette falls out of the ashtray and onto the trail of bug spray, causing it to ignite, travel across the table and lighting his incomplete term paper on fire. Paul was working as a Chemist in Shands Hospital and got a hold of pure alcohol.

Did you know that when pure alcohol burns, it's invisible? I didn't either. Paul did. But, that's why he ended up an Analytical Chemist. Anyway, it's the impurities that cause the flame. So, we added a WHOLE bunch of salt to the alcohol and set up a trough out of aluminum foil on the top of the outer edge of the table. Since the camera would be below the table, looking up, you wouldn't see this aluminum trough traveling around the table top.

So, we roll camera, pour the alcohol and light it. It works great! The flame slowly travels from one part of the table to the other. In the end, I believed that I could simply blow this flame out. Bad assumption on my part. In the film, you can actually see me try to blow the flame out, see it still raging and mouth to myself the word "Shoot" (but not "Shoot"). The flame ended up being MUCH larger than we anticipated.

Fortunately, we were prepared. Mike Beckett, a friend and fellow actor in the short, was standing by with a fire extinguisher. He sprayed the fine powder all along the trough, reaching the end. However, a small flame still survived, and the entire trough went up in flames again. Mike hit the flames again with the sputtering remains of the extinguisher and it, luckily, put the fire out.

The room was a total disaster. We had to take all of the furniture out of the house, wipe off the extinguisher powder and vacuum the entire apartment. In the end, though, it's a pretty cool effect!

And, after all, isn't that the point?