Bettendorf High School students make film

By Rachelle Treiber / QUAD-CITY TIMES / November 26, 2001

During the day, they are busy with high school.

But in the evening, they change hats to work as filmmakers, creating dozens of independent films while spending countless hours and their own dollars creating projects with a higher purpose.

And now the filmmakers, Bettendorf High School juniors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, are putting the finishing touches on perhaps their most important production to date, a 15- to 20-minute, nonprofit film titled “Yearbook.”

The film follows the lives of four teen-agers and shows the repercussions of drinking and driving through each point of view.

“We wanted to make a film with a purpose and we thought a movie about teen-agers — from teen-agers — would be different,” Woods said.

Woods and Beck, along with a large group of dedicated friends and siblings, act as writers, directors, producers, actors and editors while juggling a shooting schedule around homework, after-school activities and curfews.

“It’s a tough schedule. It’s difficult to arrange the main characters and extras when we are working around studying, sports and curfews,” Beck said.

In addition to their other roles, the 17-year-olds also run a production studio called Bluebox Limited and maintain an extensive Web site where visitors can view trailers and read about each film, purchase items from a gift shop and check dates for future production schedules.

Most of the films they make are fictional and are meant to serve a higher purpose of education regarding issues that affect teen-agers.

They hope to show “Yearbook” to organizations such as Students Against Drunk Driving, or SADD, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or MADD, as well as anyone else who could benefit from the film.

“We want to show it to the SADD and MADD clubs with the hopes of raising the issue. We would like to have SADD groups play it regionally and nationally,” Beck said. In addition, they plan to send “Yearbook” to an independent film festival in South Dakota.

The teens said they did not decide to make the film until early September, but the problem of youth drinking and driving came to their attention months earlier.

“In April, someone from Pleasant Valley was involved in an alcohol-related car crash. It made us think,” Beck said, referring to a single-vehicle accident on Valley Drive in Bettendorf in which an 11-year-old East Moline girl was killed.

He began to write the script with Woods’ assistance and they began filming in early October.

When filming most shots, two cameras are used simultaneously in order to maintain continuity and shorten the time it takes to film each scene. “We use Sony digital cameras because it’s the wave of the independent film-making future,” Beck said.

The two have come a long way since their early days in grade school, when Beck and Woods first began making films together.

“We used our action figures for the films then,” Woods said, laughing.

“We started with a few minutes per film and our longest is now 53 minutes,” Beck said.

Although the 11-page “Yearbook” script was relatively lengthy, Beck said the actors ad-libbed to give their parts a more natural, teen-age feel.

To keep things as realistic as possible, fake cigarettes and beer bottles with apple juice were used. Beck and Woods even searched the Internet for fake cigarettes to use in the party scenes. “It did not even resemble real smoke, but it worked,” Woods said.

The lighting equipment used on the film belongs to Beck’s grandfather, who worked in the film industry in California. “We just had it in our basement,” he said.

The film, which uses flashbacks in order to “make people think more,” Wood said, features original music by a 23-year-old Kentucky man whose work they discovered on the Internet.

Beck said the best thing about making small-scale, independent films, is the reasonable talent fees. “We bought pizza. You just give them food and they’re happy,” he said.

They also said their parents have backed them on this and other time-consuming projects. “Our parents are very supportive. We always enjoy showing them our films first and getting their opinions,” Beck said.