This One Time at Film Camp

While summer sleepaway camps are as iconic as American pie, SBIFF Film Camp, a partnership with the United Boys & Girls Club of Santa Barbara County, adds a special dose of movie magic to the experience. 

Offered at no expense to dozens of youth (ages 12-17), these budding filmmakers have a unique five-day overnight immersion experience at Camp Whittier, a 55-acre site in the hills of Los Padres National Forest, where they learn about the fundamentals of filmmaking from industry professionals, watch and analyze films, get hands-on training with a variety of filmmaking equipment and tools, and ultimately take part in the production of an original short film.

I sat in with the campers on a talk with producer Joe Medjuck, a longtime Montecito resident, whose films (often in collaboration with director Ivan Reitman, another longtime local) include Stripes, Ghostbusters, Legal Eagles, Twins, Beethoven, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, Jam, Six Days, Seven Nights, Old School, Up in the Air, and Draft Day, among others. The campers, who had screened Ghostbusters and Space Jam earlier in the week, were impressively engaged as Medjuck took them through his history of film from “back when a movie ticket and popcorn were 10 cents each” to the first film he ever produced, which was Ghostbusters.

“I really learned to do it by doing it,” said Medjuck of that first film experience, which came about through his friendships and his work as writer and professor. “But that’s not a good way. It’s better to work your way up a bit, to hang around the first one, work on a movie … and learn the fundamentals of what you’re doing.”

A camp asked an age-old question: “What exactly does a producer do?” 

“The producer supposedly is the person who hires everyone else. Everybody is supposedly working for the producer, but that’s not really true,” said Medjuck. “The director really makes most of the decisions.” He added, “As a producer, you mainly deal with problems. … You sit around waiting for the fire alarms to go off.” 

As for advice, Medjuck told the campers, “You’re allowed to make a mistake; make two mistakes and you’ll never work again.” 

The teens were particularly interested in the process of making Space Jam, a 1996 live-action and animated sports comedy starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny.

“Space Jam was fun because of being able to go over and watch Michael Jordan,” said Medjuck, who said that they built Jordan a temporary gym next to the set, and the minute they finished shooting the film, he would go shoot baskets. “He brought in the UCLA team to play against him, and then he brought in all these other players from the NBA that practiced with them.”

Medjuck told the teens that back in the day, no one their age made films. The equipment they’re now using, primarily iPhones (along with screenwriting software Fade In, and editing in iMovie) didn’t exist. “Steven Spielberg was partly famous because he made movies when he was a teenager. Almost no one could do it when he was your age,” said Medjuck.

But these teens certainly did make movies — six of them, in fact. I spoke to a few of the young filmmakers about their work that week during camp. 

German, a 14-year-old La Colina student who was attending the camp for the second time, worked with four other campers on a film called Chapter 4. He described it as being about an author “who doesn’t feel good enough about his book, and so he locks himself in the room for seven days. Then, when he sees the sunlight for the first time, he goes crazy.” 

It was one of several horror films created that week, which SBIFF education director Claire Waterhouse suspected might be influenced, in part, by the recent successes of Obsession (see Tiana Molony’s review here) and Backrooms, both low-budget breakout hits. 

Cash, a 16-year-old who attended SBIFF with his mom last year, described himself as being a really avid film enthusiast. “I’m very interested in film … if there’s a film discussion, I can’t help but join it,” he said. Cash said he became interested in movies about four years ago. “Something clicked where I realized this is an actual art form of not just entertainment but expression. That’s what really got me into it, was the expression and experimentation of film, rather than just the entertainment aspect of it.”

Cash worked alongside Luca (the director, age 15) and a few others on Missing Gilbert,  a comedy that turned out to be the only non-horror film in this year’s crop of shorts made at the camp. 

“One of the things I learned from one of the guest speakers was to have way more complex shots,” said Luca. Of the whole experience, he said, “It was really fun, a lot of fun, especially since we only had four people, right? Some other times I’ve gone to other camps before, and there’s been like eight people in our group, and it was a lot more stressful, but this is it felt more like we were friends, like a bunch of friends filming this together. It was really fun.”

While he’s not sure yet if he wants to be a professional filmmaker, Luca did say he’s made “about 80 different random movies” that he’s put together over time. “This is just for fun, and sometimes I do it alone, or sometimes I just do it with my friends,” he said.

The Film Camp shorts will be screened as part of the 1st Thursday S.B. Filmmaker Screening series at SBIFF’s Film Center on Thursday, August 6.