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When I was in high school, my friends and I over the course of an entire summer would shoot 35MM films. We filmed original movies only. With titles like Boris the Spider, Degenerate Donkeys and Kyle the Barbarian we utilized whatever space we could to flesh out the feature including abandoned parking lots, run down apartment complexes and for one scene in particular a tilted shack.

We’d write scripts, hand them out and study them over night and over the summer we’d complete a film in about 3-5 months time. I can remember one filming date when everyone in the crew decided that I’d wear a makeshift necklace of firecrackers under my clothing. The idea was that when the director yelled “Action!”, someone would light the firecracker and in effect it would create the illusion that I was being shot. Long story short, they wanted to set me on fire. Surprisingly I turned down the offer and we used a makeshift dummy instead. We filled condoms with ketchup and attached it to the dummy along with firecrackers and ultimately the dummy caught fire.

One particular scene in Boris the Spider called for a blubbering, truck driving idiot, a guy who would prop his tar-covered shoes on a couch and rub his greasy hands across the fabric. This slob of a human being would most likely live behind a dumpster and collect anything he assumed was valuable. However, in our film this character lived in a spotless apartment with a smudge-free television set and a glass coffee table.

For this scene I was chosen as the blubbering idiot who lived in this spectacle of an apartment and I was also scheduled to die. To disguise myself as this character I used shoe polish on my eyebrows to create black eyebrows (since I’m blonde by nature) and pressed a fake Mario-style moustache above my lips. Boris the Spider (played by a friend of mine named Greg) was to enter my apartment — unexpectedly of course — and then proceed to kill me by cracking my neck. As noted previously when my school buddies wanted to attach firecrackers to my body, there was no way in the depths of hell they were going to crack my neck.

To achieve this effect we set up a perspective shot wherein the camera pointed at a wig asphyxiated to a basketball. The camera pointed just above Greg’s shoulders so he could shake the basketball and the wig pretending that it was my head and then with a swift twist (and thanks to our off camera Foley artist) the effect of a cracked neck was achieved.

After all of the initial footage was shot, Greg and the editing team would spend the next several weeks editing the film to their liking, which meant most of the time that a good portion of my scenes were shortened in length or cut out entirely. When everyone was pleased with the editing as a whole we’d then do the post-production work which included dubbing lines if the actor’s delivery was weak or muffled and choosing the soundtrack. In most of our films we used songs from Devo, Meatloaf and Talking Heads and finally we’d screen the film to our friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and just about anyone willing to stomach the material.

It was amature movie making at its best and something I’ll treasure in my memories for years to come.