An unnerving mad scientist sort, a baby's cries, a customer admiring what seems to be his cloned creature, and gun shots, heard but not seen.
These are some of the elements of North Las Vegas resident Josh Meeter's short film "Synthetica," an entry in the 2006 CineVegas Film Festival. The eighth annual event will begin Friday and run through June 17 at the Palms.
Originally shot in November for UNLV's 48-hour film festival by Meeter as director, along with writer and actor Jason Tillmon and editor and actor Nicholas Anapolsky, the science fiction piece now showcases an enhanced element that has become central to the piece -- ambience.
"The atmosphere really made the movie -- I wanted (the plot) to sort of stay ambiguous, so it was more about the atmosphere," Tillmon said.
Meeter, Tillmon and Anapolsky call their production company MeeterVision Entertainment.
For the UNLV contest, each group of filmmakers was given a set of guidelines.
"They gave us the character of a pet shop owner, the genre of science fiction and a line of dialogue from "Dr. Strangelove" -- 'There's no fighting in here. This is the war room,' -- and a prop, which was a deck of cards," Meeter said.
The deck of cards ended up merely sitting on a table in the film, but the rest of the interpretation changed slightly from the original guidelines.
"Nick's character is a scientist, and he's putting together some kind of synthetic beings, creatures," Meeter said. "We sort of decided not to go with the pet shop angle from the beginning. We went into a pet shop and looked around, and it just wasn't there."
Rather than focus on the exact type of creatures that Anapolsky's scientist character creates, Meeter said the trio decided to make atmosphere the film's emphasis.
"Jason's character comes in like he's buying something, like he's in on whatever the scientist is doing, but then we leave it wide open so people can come up with their own interpretation," Meeter said. "We didn't want to do a lot of explaining, because we felt like that would take people out of the movie."
After UNLV's film festival, Meeter, Tillmon and Anapolsky decided to make some changes to "Synthetica," and enter the film in CineVegas.
Meeter, Tillmon and Anapolsky spent a few weeks in late January and early February re-working the film, and it was accepted in CineVegas' Nevada Filmmaking Shorts category.
In the end, Meeter said the movie came out differently than what he envisioned at the outset. "Once you get into the editing, it turns into an entirely different movie," he said.
When the film was originally created, Tillmon said he conceived its plot and wrote it on the fly.
"We were given the criteria, and I came up with the idea and wrote about a page and a half, in the car on the way here," he said. "I just described how it should look, the atmosphere."
Meeter, Tillmon and Anapolsky bought flood lights, a fog machine and a doll for "Synthetica" and filmed the first version of the movie in about six hours.
Compared with his original idea, Tillmon said the reworked and final version of the film was "pretty close to what I was thinking."
For the UNLV film festival, Meeter said the film had to be less than five minutes long. After re-shooting, Anapolsky, who edited both film and sound for "Synthetica," extended the film to six minutes.
"Some parts were really too long and I had to cut those short," he said. "I guess that's the job of the editor -- to make sure people don't fall asleep."
Meeter said Anapolsky spent about one week editing and working on the film's sound effects. "There were some minor special effects in a few parts of the film, and those took a little while to do," he said. "The crucial part was getting the pacing right so it's not too long, so we showed it to a couple of people and they gave us input."
For both versions of "Synthetica," MeeterVision used the offices of the MIM Group, the advertising agency Meeter and Anapolsky work for, as the film's set, as well as using the agency's sound library.
"The sound effects really helped build suspense," Meeter said with a laugh. "Without them, it would put you to sleep, maybe."
Meeter said the trio got involved with the UNLV 48-hour film festival because Anapolsky and Tillmon are UNLV students, but "Synthetica" wasn't MeeterVision's first movie.
"We did a clay-mation movie a few years ago. It was Steven Spielberg and George Lucas fighting over a Lifetime Achievement award," he said. "It was not exactly of the quality to submit to CineVegas. We made it when we were just out of high school."
Meeter said he's known Tillmon since he started making movies about 10 years ago, and met Anapolsky about two years ago. MeeterVision also has created a few other movies, but Meeter said they were mainly exercises in filmmaking.
Meeter and Anapolsky also have created commercials for the MIM Group, and are currently working on a potential television project.
MeeterVision Entertainment's vision is growing -- the group's next project is a full-length film. Though Tillmon has just begun writing the script, the trio hopes to shoot the film over the summer.
"We've done so many short films, this is the next step," Tillmon said.
Archived Editions| Advertising | Contact The Staff
