Every film production is an education for the people involved. What makes the new feature film Trailerpark so special is the fact that it’s being made by students at Ohio University, as part of an advanced narrative production class. Their teacher, Frederick Lewis, obtained the shooting rights for Russell Banks’ acclaimed 1981 short story collection of the same name. The film has been in production since the winter quarter of last year, and is due to have a premiere screening for the university on June 7, before playing at the Lake Placid Film Festival in New York.
“It’s a very exciting opportunity to be a student working in a professional environment and getting to see how a set is run,” said director of photography Andrew Poland.
The project presented various daunting challenges, with intersecting plot-lines balancing thirteen lead roles, and requiring key scenes to be shot on a frozen lake and around a burning trailer. The students built their own trailer park ten miles from the university, and got access to nine mobile home trailers. Poland and his peers developed a specific shooting style within each of the characters’ trailers, and enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with various film techniques. Yet Poland knew early on that acquiring the necessary gear to shoot the project would be a nightmare.
“I knew that with the gear our school had, it would be incredibly difficult borrowing the needed equipment from friends,” Poland said. “I’m a college student, so I have to make difficult decisions everyday paying for lunch or dinner. And when I got in contact with Steve [Weiss], he was gracious enough to lease us a full Zacuto (DOF documentary) package for the duration of our production, and it’s been absolutely amazing. The versatility of the equipment has proven to be wonderful in time pinches. If we’re moving from trailer to trailer, [we can] change the size of the rig based on the size of the space that we’re working in. We can take half the rig off and it’s still just as effective as the full rig.”
For more information on Trailerpark, including links to behind the scenes footage, visit http://www.trailerparkmovie.com/
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