Tonight a University of Central Arkansas faculty member will host a campus premier of his new short film about a teen mom and how she deals with the after effects of a school shooting. The premier will begin with a reception at 7:30 and the showing of the film at 8 p.m. in Snow Fine Arts Center.
The 25-minute film is a fiction narrative titled ?Abbey and Everything After.?
Dr. Bruce Hutchinson, assistant professor of mass communications, said the film is a fusion of two scripts he had written. ?I had worked on a script about a school shooting before Columbine and when that happened, I decided fiction couldn?t overcome reality, so I set that script aside. When I came to Arkansas, I started working on a script about a single mom and eventually decided to fuse my two scripts together.?
The movie was filmed at various locations in Conway including the campus. ?Main Hall was the high school,? Hutchinson said.
The film includes actors from the UCA theatre department and local actors from Conway and neighboring towns.
Hutchinson decided to premier the film on campus because the crew that produced the film was comprised of UCA students who enrolled in his summer course in digital filmmaking. ?Since we shot a lot of the film at UCA and the crew was UCA students, I thought it would be good to have the first screening on campus. I wanted to show the kind of product the film program can produce.?
In the coming months, Hutchinson and his students will search for festivals in which to enter the film. ?We?re going to start doing our research and picking festivals that we have a good chance to get into. We don?t want to shoot too high or too low ? we want to be competitive. Certainly the big one that everyone shoots for is Sundance, and we might try to enter it,? Hutchinson said.
-Jennifer Boyett
