Jack Mayer is nervous. Leaning on a metal desk in the one-room office of Fire Escape Films in the basement of the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall, surrounded by cameras, cables, and computers, the young film director and fourth-year college student holds the brim of a tropical print ball cap and stares at the floor, thinking very hard. Mayer and his cast and crew of fifteen have spent eighteen months and thirteen grand turning his screenplay “A Girl Named Clyde” into a feature-length film. The movie is supposed to premiere in about two hours, upstairs, in the theater of the UofC’s Doc Films. Shot in high-definition, the film’s digital file is so big that the Doc Films system may not be able to handle it, and there’s no time to write a DVD. The search is on for a small cord that might be able to connect the film to the Doc system, but Mayer wants a backup plan. In a slight Georgia accent he sighs, “We gotta find ourselves a projector…” Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s not hard to make this stuff look good,” says filmmaker Mitra Sticklen, pausing in between shots of the bright green kale and collards on display on a stand at the 61st Street Farmers Market. “It’s beautiful stuff—beautiful footage.” The stand belongs to Windy City Harvest, an urban agriculture job training program of the Chicago Botanic Garden and West Side Technical Institute, whose participants Sticklen has been filming since last fall. With the working title “Growing Change,” the film was originally meant to be a ten-minute short documenting one season of the program. During the course of filming, however, Sticklen “realized that there were several stories going on that were inspiring and interesting”—the farmer’s market itself, for instance, as well as a number of other urban agriculture initiatives that have recently sprung up across the city. Now Windy City Harvest is the focus of a demo reel, whose June 5 screening at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center Sticklen hopes will help win her funding for a longer film or television documentary. Read the rest of this entry »

College was supposed to be a land of both social and academic opportunity. To a large extent it is, even at a work-intensive school like the University of Chicago. But how exactly these opportunities present themselves, and how ardently we protect them and involve ourselves, is a more complicated tale. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s a transmitter, D Radio for speaking to God.” Valois Restaurant. Strobe Light. At six o’clock in Cox Lounge this is the only direction in which our team’s film is going. This is the first hour of University of Chicago filmmaking society Fire Escape Films’ Second Annual 48 Hour Film Festival. The goal: One approximately eight-minute short film. The problem: It must be written, filmed, and edited between 6pm Friday and 6pm Sunday. I’m not really sure how successful this endeavor will be with a three-hour time slot on Saturday, and Sunday to edit, but hey… either way I scored a free T-shirt. As we were walking out, I could hear the collective creativity fizzing: “So…the whole film will basically be a metaphor for sex?” No doubt it will be interesting to see what the diverse group of UofC students in the room will come up with. Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Leibowich, a fourth-year Cinema & Media Studies student at the University of Chicago, has finished postproduction on “John Doe and the Anonymous Nothing,” a film he has been working on since high school. Before his film was screened for the public for the first time, he eagerly agreed to an interview. On the couches in the far corner of Ex Libris, with a trademark grin and a tone of unwavering enthusiasm, he told the story of how his film took form over the course of his high school and college careers. Read the rest of this entry »