Student director finishes his first movie

Tom Getty would hang out the window of a car going 90 mph to achieve his dreams, and in his… Tom Getty would hang out the window of a car going 90 mph to achieve his dreams, and in his first full-length movie, “Emulation,” that’s just what he had to do.

For an elaborate chase scene on the parkway, Getty, a senior communication major from Johnstown, Pa., getting the right shot required sticking his body out of a car and dangling his camera 9 inches off the pavement.

“I almost fell out of the car,” Getty said. “I wouldn’t want to do that again.”

But there isn’t much that Getty wouldn’t do to finish his film, which will show in the William Pitt Union Assembly Room Wednesday starting at 7:30 p.m.

“Emulation,” a project Getty has been working on for the past two years, revolves around one man and a company that recreates the experience of living through a movie.

“Say you want to live through ‘Die Hard.’ They’ll put you in a building with pyrotechnics and music playing, with guys in ski masks shooting blanks,” Getty said.

The idea came from Getty waiting through the previews in 2007 for the movie “Death Sentence” when a trailer for the George Clooney thriller “Michael Clayton” played.

Getty was immediately hooked — sort of.

“I thought that would be pretty terrible to live in a movie, but it would be a neat company to have,” Getty said. “I thought I could do something with that.”

After transferring from Pitt’s Johnstown campus to Oakland, Getty spent a year filming the movie on the weekends, usually only three hours per weekend because of his friends’ busy schedules.

Even for Getty, the change of life between movie world and real world was demanding.

“Between school, filming, editing and this upcoming sneak peek, it’s tough switching gears constantly,” Getty said.

The film takes place in Pittsburgh and includes many scenes in and around Pitt’s campus.

At first, Getty worried about bringing a prosumer video camera around campus and the attention it might draw.

“As ubiquitous as cameras are today, no one wants to be on film,” Getty said.

But eventually, the setting truly paid off.

“It’s like a playground around Oakland to make an action movie,” Getty said, running off his list of locations, including Posvar Hall, escalators, buses and the parkway.

Of course, Getty couldn’t complete “Emulation” by himself. His friend from high school, Matt Meehan, assisted the shoot as director of photography.

Meehan, a 25-year-old graduate of Penn State living in Johnstown, Pa., works mostly on indie work in the Pittsburgh area.

“It was a lot of work,” Meehan said of his time working on “Emulation.” “The biggest challenge was working with no budget, shooting in locations with no budget, looking for people to work with no budget.”

But Getty said he feels that a big budget isn’t needed to make a movie.

“You don’t need a million dollars. You don’t need to go out to LA. Whatever you have, that’s what you put into the movie,” Getty said. “We had a car. We have a car chase.”

With minimal funds for advertising, Getty hopes word of mouth will be his best marketing campaign for “Emulation.” From there, he hopes to acquire an agent and send it through festivals, eventually praying, like every independent filmmaker, for a distributor to step in.

But filmmaking has been in Getty’s heart for quite some time.

Since age 8, he enjoyed writing anything he could. Soon he received a camera and went straight to making movies.

Getty cites directors Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese and David Fincher as some of his personal influences, emphasizing their masteries of the concepts of fear and time.

Finally, though, after editing 10 hours of footage into an 84-minute film, Getty will get the chance to see his film fulfill its purpose: Keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

But that doesn’t mean Getty himself is finally fulfilled.

From “Emulation” alone, he learned more than he thought possible.

“You realize you know nothing, and you will learn everything.”