Break Room to show festival films

Local filmmakers to screen entries from 48-hour contest
By Christina Hansen - CJOnline.com- original story here
July 20, 2010

Topeka filmmakers who participated in a fast-paced, DIY-style film festival earlier this month will step into the spotlight this week when their films are screened for a hometown audience at a downtown eatery.

The Break Room, 911 S. Kansas Ave., will be hosting a watch party Thursday featuring two films created by local crews for the Wild West Film Fest. The party will kick off at 8 p.m., and attendees can order from the restaurant’s full dinner menu and sip on 99-cent sangria while enjoying two films that were created completely on the fly.

The Wild West Film Fest is unusual in that, instead of screening films submitted months in advance, organizers give participants exactly 48 hours to write, shoot and edit an entire film. The only parameters governing the competition were that the resulting films follow the theme of Superheroes and Villains and a have a running time of five minutes or less. The top 27 entries were screened a week later at the festival, held July 10 at Lawrence’s Liberty Hall.

This year’s festival was the fifth in which Topeka filmmakers Dave Uhler, Shaun Collins and Glenn Bartlett have participated. While their team’s entry earned first prize at last year’s competition, Uhler said some of Hollywood’s most hackneyed films were actually what inspired the trio to begin working together.

“The three of us decided long ago that all of the movie companies that make full-feature movies – they’re making really bad movies,” he said. “Why can’t we make really bad movies, too? So we got together and made a short film a few years back, and since then, when this film festival came around, we just went right into it.”

Uhler, Collins and Bartlett work with a revolving team of friends, associates and acquaintances, each year striving to make the 48-hour scramble more efficient. Over the years, they have whittled down the stages of filmmaking from a chaotic blitzkrieg to a pseudo-scientific process.

“We try not to waste any time working on ideas or portions of the script that aren’t going to make it to the final cut,” he said. “We don’t pick up the camera until halfway through the next day. We’re already almost 24 hours in, usually a little bit sooner than that, before we even start shooting. We spend the evening after we get the criteria just brainstorming well into the early hours, and then sleep on it while our writer, Shaun Collins, writes it. Then when we wake up the next morning, we go over it, and from there we start working on locations and props and costumes and all that.”

Their entry for this year’s festival is Match Me If You Can – a spoof on the ubiquitous television ads for online dating service eHarmony. The film focuses on a service called eRivalry created to help match superheroes with their star-crossed rivals. The film didn’t place in this year’s competition, but Uhler said he was looking forward to Thursday’s watch party where he could experience an audience’s reaction firsthand.

“In the field of filmmaking, television production and all of that, you don’t get a lot of feedback, because people watch just in their living rooms or they watch in the theater where you’re supposed to be quiet,” he said. “This gives us a chance for people to watch it and immediately give feedback, and that helps me know what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong.”

That feedback will no doubt prove useful as the trio prepares to compete in the 48 Hour Film Project next month in Kansas City. Uhler described the event as a worldwide competition staged in various cities, including Paris, London and Los Angeles.

“We are entered in that and looking forward to doing the best we can there,” he said. “We’ve got all of the aspects filled out with the right people now, so we’re really looking forward to this one. I think we’ve got a good team now – we’re solid.”

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday
WHERE: The Break Room, 911 S. Kansas Ave.
FYI Dinner is served from 5 - 9 p.m. The featured drink special will be 99-cent sangria.

THE FILMS:
• Two films will be shown at Thursday’s watch party. The first will be Match Me If You Can, created by Dave Uhler, Glenn Bartlett, Shaun Collins, Laurie Uhler, Kellen Jenkins, Keith Miles, Amber O'Dell, Adam Smith, Amber Whitlock, Corey Shoup, James Heckard, Jesse Cook, Mel Stewart, Patrick Truitt and Julian Green.

• The second film is Stroking the Heat, created by Rusty Wiley, George Valyer, Austen Bunyar, Josh Luttrell, Maxwell Frederickson, Ashley Bunyar, Joshua Shore, Andrew Reynolds, Eli Lister and Lincoln Bunyar.