Superheroes and interventions are typically unrelated themes, but on Oct. 26, they were both topics for two short films that won awards at the Campus Moviefest Finale at MADCAP Theaters.
“Intervention” won Best Drama and “The Amazing Short Lived Adventure of Exploding Man” won Best Comedy. There were 85 teams total (who submitted 85 movie entries). Ultimately, 16 films were chosen for the finale. These films, five minutes long or less, were narrowed down to the Best Picture, Best Drama and Best Comedy, as well as the AT&T Wild Card, which still needs to be chosen by text vote. These films will move onto the Western Regional Grand Finale, which will be held Nov. 14 in San Francisco.
So why did these films win? The writers and directors for two of the films revealed behind-the-scenes information on how the films were made and what their purposes were.
Best Drama – “Intervention”
Martin Munoz, writer and director of the Best Drama category winner at the Campus Moviefest, poses for a photo in Tempe. Photo by Branden Eastwood
Martin Muñoz , a film and media studies junior, directed the film “Intervention.” The film is about a young man who tries to take his life by submerging himself in a bathtub full of water and electrocuting himself. He enters an afterlife “waiting room,” where he meets another young man who explains why he is there. The young man starts seeing bits and pieces of his life around the waiting room, such as his cat, friends, guitar and girlfriend. He realizes how much he misses his life and the other young man in the waiting room gives him a second chance to go back, which he embraces. He then wakes up in the bathtub and his girlfriend rushes to give him a hug.
Muñoz says the film topic had more to do with the location than anything else.
“We shot in a studio…I mainly wanted to play with lights a lot,” he says. “We had this big huge room, this big dark room.”
He says the desolate room reminded him and his crew members of another realm.
“We kind of stuck around that dark purgatory theme, which kind of kept going back to suicide,” Muñoz says. “Nothing personal with us.”
The filming took seven hours on the first day in the studio, he says.
In the film, there seems to be a focus on the girlfriend of the young man, who happens to be a ballerina.
“We came up with this…love thing,” Muñoz says. “When our main character dies, he notices all these things that he’s missed, that he’s loved, and she’s the most significant one out of all of them. When he sees her, it’s supposed to be like…the most emotional part.”
His roommate Leslie Peterson, an English literature sophomore and dancer, plays the girlfriend, so that is the main reason for the ballerina aspect. Kyle Walters, not a current ASU student, played the main character and boyfriend.
“We wanted her to stand out, so she’s wearing this majestic ballerina dress,” Muñoz says. “We had this bright blue ballerina costume in this complete darkness, and everything else was just kind of bland and plain, besides the glowing guitar.”
Jonathan Millard, the director of photography and an interdisciplinary arts and performance junior, says there are two visual motifs in the short film.
Toward the end of the film, there was a smiley face placed on the main character’s face, when he decides he wants to have his life back, and the color white is ever-present, possibly representing purity, in the movie, from a white guitar to white spotlights and a white shirt on the main character, he says.
“A lot of these things are on accident,” Millard says.
Muñoz says the filming took seven hours on the first day in the studio.
One unusual aspect of the film was the use of his roommate’s cat, Jack.
This was Muñoz and Millard’s first time working with animals on set.
“We were in the big studio and [the cat] ran away at one point and went under all the set pieces…and we had to find it,” Millard says.
The filmmakers both enjoyed different outcomes of the film.
“I just loved the shots in it. We had the lights, the studio and just the darkness. It was a lot of fun to be able to play around and have all that equipment to our availability,” Millard says. “I’ve never shot in a studio before. It really helped me utilize my creative bone.”
Having fun, joking around and cooperating together was enjoyable for Muñoz, along with certain scenes from the film.
“The intro, after [the actor, Kyle] was sitting there dripping and it just pans up his entire body, that was one of my favorite shots because he just looks soaking, it kind of establishes him [in] this area,” he says.
Muñoz says his other favorite scene was the dance sequence, with the ballerina girlfriend.
Best Comedy – “The Amazing Short Lived Adventure of Exploding Man”
Dajarne Bourne and Chris Nash, the creative team behind the award winning comedy "The Amazing Short Lived Adventure of Exploding Man." Phot by Branden Eastwood
Chris Nash, a fifth-year psychology senior with a minor in biology, wrote, directed and starred in “Exploding Man.”
“Basically, I write stories. I’m a stand-up comedian so I like to write these little stories randomly and this was a really small story that I had written beforehand,” Nash says. “I wanted to answer that question that I had in my head of, ‘Why is the book always better than the movie?’ ‘What goes wrong with the story when they’re trying to translate it into a film?’”
He says it’s true, that a story and film can’t be the same.
“Even if you do it yourself, you can’t quite make it the same as the thing you wrote,” Nash says. ”In my story, I never really explained what anyone’s doing, but in the movie it’s apparent.”
The movie was about a superhero, Exploding Man, who explodes when he gets distracted. The short film starts with a little girl whose cat, Cancer, gets stuck in a tree. Exploding Man comes to the rescue, and the cat eventually jumps out of the tree, but Exploding Man, well, explodes.
Dejarne “DJ” Bourne, a digital art senior, created the special effects for the short film and is also Nash’s girlfriend.
He says that DJ wants to go to grad school but needs to have a portfolio of her work first, so he decided to make the film so she could add the experience to her resumé and as a sort of gift.
“She wants to eventually go to Hollywood and work on big movies and do special effects for, I don’t know, the next James Bond film or something,” Nash says.
There was no real expectation of winning, as this was his first film.
“The fact that it won, that was just extra,” he says.
Some little known facts are that the Exploding Man costume was found at Goodwill in the female clothes’ section and Nash created a picture of dynamite on the shirt by using markers and paint.
“The easiest part of the movie was my costume cause I just wanted to look stupid and that was pretty easy if you go to Goodwill — close your eyes and just pick stuff off the shelf,” Nash says.
One of his favorite scenes in the movie is when Exploding Man turns to the little girl and the narrator says, “The man looked at the little girl like a sack of lettuce found deep in the refrigerator several months after purchase.”
The short film took around four and a half days to make, and now Nash is on to other projects, such as creating a stand-up comedy group on campus. More information on his work can be found at theukisonmyface.com.
All 16 short films can be found on campusmoviefest.com.
Contact the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu
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