The ideal way to spend their winter break: filming, plush dolls

It took two and a half years, but I finally figured out the ideal way to spend winter break…. It took two and a half years, but I finally figured out the ideal way to spend winter break.

During freshman year, I had tried my hand at finding a three-week job, but came up empty-handed. Last year, I didn’t even do that, and I spent the entire recess parked in front of the television, taking in as many showings of “A Christmas Story” as TNT could muster.

But the week before finals started, I knew this break would be different.

It was during that week that I received an e-mail from two high school friends. They planned to gather a group of people and spend winter vacation making a short film. They’d done the same thing last year, but I hadn’t heard about it soon enough to become seriously involved. Now they asked me to participate. I gave them a tentative OK.

After finals, I left school worn down and depressed, having weathered my most difficult semester ever, and looking forward to focusing my attention and effort into something completely different. I wasn’t going to get a job or sit in front of the TV; I was going to join the ranks of ambitious, overachieving college students and do something productive and worthwhile with my time off.

I was going to help make a movie.

Production started when all of the key members of the cast and crew arrived home from their respective colleges. Though I wasn’t a principal cast member, I did have a bit part as a singing, dancing, hockey goalie in a chorus line of mismatched, obscure characters, including a bandito, a drag queen, a Marine, a disheveled businessman and a K-Mart employee. This role involved a lot of falling down, but I was up for that.

But most of my time was spent behind the camera as the boom operator. It sounds complex, but it just involves holding the microphone up for long periods of time and angling it in a certain way.

My other duties included convincing a Pittsburgh city police officer to park his car in front of Giant Eagle and turn on the light bar so that we could film it, occasionally holding the slate in front of the camera, driving all over suburban Pennsylvania looking for a small, plush gorilla doll, and picking up enough food from Wendy’s to feed the Prussian army.

Though I wasn’t one of the project’s organizers, they welcomed, and often used, my creative input. For the first time in more than a year, I felt as though I was part of something special. It may not sound exciting, but it was.

I got a kick out of walking around the mall with a walkie-talkie and a headset, making sure certain aspects of the shot went smoothly, while people I graduated from high school with walked past, no doubt on their way to shop for groceries or rent videos.

Cast and crew met at 8 a.m. for more than a week. A typical shooting day lasted more than 12 hours, and we seldom had time to break for meals. It was absolutely exhausting, but I loved every minute of it. From shooting outside the Benedum Downtown in what felt like arctic temperatures, to roaming the supermarket aisles at 3 a.m. while a manager and an employee had a fight over the intercom, I never stopped enjoying myself.

And I got to witness the product when the movie premiered for cast, crew, family and friends last Friday at the Heinz History Center. I got to wear my nicest suit, kick back and watch the final cut of film we’d all worked so hard to create. I’ve never felt more gratified; it was even better than acing a final or finishing a paper, because this was something I did by choice. It was a wonderful experience. Not only did I help create a great short film, but I also made new friends and became closer to old ones than I had been.

In March, the movie – entitled “Winning Caroline” – will go off to the Ivy League Film Festival and, hopefully, a number of other, more prestigious events. And when it does, I’ll be proud to have my name on it.

Although Matt Wein was a proponent of naming the movie “Knock, Knock Bananas,” he was nevertheless thrilled that it was completed on schedule. E-mail him at mattwein@hotmail.com.