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?

Microcinema Flashback - The Grass is Always Greener (2000)

Near the end of last century, when I first started moving from professional entertainment production to independent film production, I got involved with the microcinema revolution. For the first time in history you could shoot your own project, edit it on a computer without degradation, create your own DVDs and distribute them over the internet. It was a brave new world.

I got heavily involved with a couple of new websites at the time, primarily one called REwind Video. Funny thing is, Jon Ashby, who started REwind with his friend Wally Fong, recently interviewed me about Club God for his new website Common Film. It was the first time we had actually spoken to each other, even though we had known each other online for 10 years.

Anyway, back to history... after some time of trolling the microcinema scene forums and websites, I started contributing articles which were published online. The first one is from October 2000 and was before I moved into Christian film with Sonlight Pictures. I realized later that the Lord was using my years as a microcinema filmmaker to prepare me for Sonlight Pictures.

Since this blog will be ending this year, I thought that I'd take some time to officially document these prior online articles here in what I'll call Microcinema Flashbacks. They'll also eventually land in one of my blog books for my kids. Not that they're great reading, per se, but more about where I was as a filmmaker on my own faith journey.

I'm publishing them here in all of their original glory. There are words I wouldn't use today in them as well as a youthful, independent attitude that has dulled over the years, but the points of view certainly do express where I was as a film maker and as a husband and father during that time.

They'll be a lot of references to film companies and filmmakers that have long since abandoned their hopes of being professional filmmakers and settled down to a normal life. Amazing how things change in a decade.

****

The Grass is Always Greener
by Pete Bauer

The one thing you can count on in life is that you're never satisfied. It's what's helped mankind overcome hardships, put a man on the moon and make the Porky's films. And when you and your buddies get together like the Little Rascals to "put on a show" you always wish you had more time, more money and, for some, more talent. Some of you are reaching for the ultimate goal of making a living making movies. I think we'd all love that. But, take it from someone who's been in television and film, making films with your buddies is some of the best times you'll ever have. Not only do you have creative control, but you also have the most important factor... fun.

I've been writing feature screenplays since high-school. Some have been bought, some have been made and some outright suck. I took my first dip into real filmdom when I co-wrote a film called ADRENALINE with a director friend of mine. She worked for years trying to raise the money to do it the old fashioned way and it was taking too long. So, she got with some stunt friends of hers and came up with a premise for a film. We banged out the script, READY, WILLING & ABLE, scrounged together an amazingly small amount of money and they shot it two years ago on film. It's got foreign distribution and they're still looking for domestic. And now they're back to the original cause, raising money for ADRENALINE again.

So, when I look at the big picture, I realized that I've been very fortunate. I've been able to live in the "dreaded" real world while my friends have done a lot of the grunt work in LALA Land. My friends been able to pound the Hollywood pavement while I've been able to stay in Florida, married and with a couple of great kids. In a lot of ways, my RWA co-horts are my heroes... their dedication and time involved in pursuing the completion of RWA has been amazing to me. But, in the same respect, I don't envy them at all. The day-to-day networking and ass-kissing seems inconceivable at times. I've participated as much as possible, but it didn't take me long to realize that I'd rather spend time with my children then with somebody who knows somebody who may have an uncle who just won the lottery and who may want to invest in a film that is important for my career, but not important to anyone else. But, in the time it's taken to get one film made and another working toward financing, a lot of you have made scores of short films. If your anything like the frenzied people at Random Foo and Pangaea, you've made 50 films in that time! So, the question is, who's better at telling stories? The people who made one film or the people who've made 50?

And the sad fact is that business of show business stinks. I went out to LA to go to the American Film Market and I've got to tell you the distribution process is offensive. In many ways it's legalized prostitution. You see so many people all trying to do the same thing and selling their creative souls in the process, each one trying to snatch the money out of the handful of people who have it. The end result is a mish-mash of similiar films with low-end actors in predictable stories. At least within the limited budgetary scope of RWA we tried to be unique in the characters and action, but, in the end, this probably hurt us more than help. And as broadband becomes more available to internet users, the distribution chains will evolve and you won't have to sell your soul to get someone other than your family to watch your stuff. REwind Theater is a perfect example. So, there is some light at the end of the distribution tunnel.

Everything comes down to priorities and sacrifice. And at this stage of my life, until I get an ungodly inheritance from some Uncle I've never met or my wife and kids decide they don't need to eat anymore, I've rejoined the ranks of the Amateurs again (and since I've made so little in filmdom so far, this isn't much of a leap). I've gone back to my Super-8 roots and have decided to "put on a show" called JUSTICE. When I'm done, I'll open it up for public scrutiny and mockery. I'll learn from it and move on to the next one. After all, we all just want to tell stories. Some are better at it than others, but the point is that we each have something to say. Do I still want to make "real" movies when I grow up? You bet. But, I've realized that getting my friends together to shoot a harmless flick is some of the best fun I can have.

Enjoy the process, enjoy the friendship and enjoy tapping into one of the basic human urges... telling stories. Because, we all know, our films probably aren't going to change the world, but they will change our world.