TALK TO US: Contact Emily Hughey or Kyle Ramsey at (785) 864-4810 or editor@kansan.com
FEATURES
10A
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WWW.KANSAN.COM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 2001
Local filmmakers lan Duermeier, left, Lawrence sophomore; Sara Huslig, Lawrence freshman; and Thomas Hamm, Lawrence resident, worship the work of directors such as Kevin Smith and Tim Burton. Shoku Chudoko, the group's film company that means "food poisoning" in Japanese, took a big step when it decided to turn a year's worth of screenwriting into a full-lenth film titled Much Ado about Angels and Demons.
Silver screen dreams Local filmmakers deliver statements with their creations
STORY BY LUKE WETZEL
Sara Huslig's apartment is a film-lover's heaven. Her walls are lined with bigger-tnan-lire movie posters, like the Jack Nicholson one above that peers into the Shoku Chudoku production room.
THAD ALLENDER/KANSAN
In addition to learning how to manage lighting difficulties and edit hours of footage, the half dozen members of film company Shoku Chudoko have learned a thing or two about dealing with police.
At a filming session for a short gangster film set at the Campanile, the group aroused the suspicion of a nearby officer.
"Generally our policy is to alert the authorities of our presence beforehand," said Ian Duermier, Lawrence sophomore.
This time, however, that step was not taken.
"Ian and I were sitting there in our car with our trench coats and BB guns," said Thomas Hamm, Lawrence resident. "This other car pulls up, and we get out carrying briefcases. This cop immediately pulls up because it looked like the deal was about to go sour."
Hamm said he told the officer they had some BB guns and were planning to shoot some stuff.
"Shoot's not the right word when dealing with officers," Duermier said with a sigh. "You need to say 'film.'"
An interest in film and a mutual desire to sound more professional prompted Duermeyer and Hamm to form Shoku Chudoku, which means "food poisoning," in Japanese.
Duermeier and Hamm said Tim Burton and Kevin Smith were the directors who influenced them the most.
"It helps us organize," Duermeier said of the company. "It gives you something to go off of."
"Kevin Smith is who everybody likes to equate us with," Duermeier said of the director of Clerks and Mall Rats. "Our stuff is very dialogue-driven."
The company's first films were a series of short films exploring the group's fascination with video games and food. One of them, titled Carl, featured a protagonist who directly plugged himself into
four simultaneously operating video game machines.
The 90-minute movie, which Duermeier calls a "dark comedy," chronicles an effort by several different characters to retrieve Gabriel's horn, which allows people to enter heaven. The film has limited special effects, but by the end of the summer, the group will have something most 19-year-old filmmakers won't: a complete original score.
The group turned a year's worth of screenwriting and filming into a full-length film titled Much Ado about Angels and Demons.
Sara Huslig, a Lawrence freshman
who began writing music when she was 17, soon will complete her first score. Her apartment, lined with faces such as Jack Nicholson and the female robot from Metropolis, is a temple-to-soundtrack composer Danny Elfman. Elfman, who wrote the scores for movies such as Batman Returns and Good Will Hunting, is Huslig's biggest influence.
Huslig has assembled a 30-piece orchestra made up of local high school students to rehearse and record her score.
"I put up a sheet at Lawrence Free State and expected to get only 15 signatures, but when I came back there were
30 names on there," she said. "I set it up as a completely voluntary thing, so they're doing it for fun." Huslig said she plans to lead hearsails three to four times a week during the summer in the band room at Lawrence Free State High School, 4700 Overland Drive, beginning tomorrow.
Shoku Chudoko members plan to save $9,000 for new equipment. They also want to set up a Web site and make a silent film to show at the Lawrence Arts Center, 200 W. Ninth St.
The group's funniest material is perhaps not in its scripted films but in a series of appearances it recorded on
"The song was by a band from Indianapolis called Johnny Socko," Osbern said. "It was all about how there are better things for cows than making them into glue and food. I just went through the Internet and got a whole montage of cows."
After studying film at the University of Kansas, Osbern plans to head to California to continue working in film.
The film, titled Evaporate, won first prize in last year's KAN film festival in the high school division. It was also picked up by the pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline, to show in antismoking clinics. Since then, Osbern's company has made short films with computer animation and filmed weddings and dance recitals for money. Osbern won another prize in the KAN festival this year, this time in the music video category.
Speaker's Corner, a television show on Channel 5. In their appearances on the show, the crew and friends have appeared backed by an angry mob, with limbs on fire, faces bloodied and beaten and speaking behind plants they held up in front of the camera.
"I'm going to do this as long as I still like it," he said. "This is just another avenue through which I can be creative."
"I interviewed four people who basically can't leave their apartments because of smoking." Osbern said. "They're hooked up to oxygen machines. One of them died after I made the movie, so I dedicated it to her."
The members of Shoku Chudoko are not the Lawrence filmmakers. Jeremy Osbern, Lawrence sophomore, made a name for himself with an award-winning documentary about smoking.
Wetzel can be reached at 964-4810 or writer@kansan.com