Eight identical bloodstained blue night gowns and $3,000 worth of groceries are among the ingredients required for the making of one low-budget horror movie.
The almost 300-member Kent State University Independent Film Company is currently shooting Hell at Heathridge, and it struggles to contend with its $30,000-35,000 in expenses.
The full-length feature, which will finish taping Aug. 3, and which will premiere Dec. 5, relates a story of murder, suicide and ghostly visitation in a college setting.
“It’s truly a struggle for this program to raise money,” Traci Easley Williams, a lecturer in the departments of Journalism and Mass Communications and Pan African Studies, who co-founded the film company in 2008, said. “Start-up money comes from my bank account for our film projects, and then I just hope that we are able to make up that money through the fundraising the students do.”
Revenue sources have included dinner night benefits at restaurants, including Five Guys and Appleby’s, and one local saloon, Bar-157, contributed half of one night’s receipts to the venture. “We have one Kent State alum who consistently donates $1,000 dollars to every film,” Williams said, “and the deans are giving us money from different departments here at Kent State because students from their colleges are involved in the project.”
“Traci and I—every year—we have to spend a lot of our own money,” Dave Smeltzer, the other founder of the company and an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, said. “We try to raise money, but it’s never enough. They’re not going to fail because of finances.”
To help pay this year’s film, the company reached out online to Kickstarter.com and FundAnything.com, two websites where creative endeavors groups can solicit funds. “I helped out with the writing and copy editing ,” Nathan Mitchell, who works as 2nd assistant camera, said. “Then there were other people who wrote teaser trailers, along with the interviews of the actors and directors, just to show people we knew what we were doing.”
“Kickstarter did not go very well,” Williams said, “but I’m happy we did it because I actually learned a lot from helping the kids put the project together. On Kickstarter, if you don’t reach your goal, you get nothing.”
“We’re on FundAnything,” Williams said, “It’s Donald Trump’s site(http://fundanything.com/en/campaigns/hell-at-heathridge-a-feature-length-horror-film), and that’s going pretty well. The great thing about this site, unlike Kickstarter, is that we get to keep all the funds we raise.”
The group’s target amount online now is $8,000. “We’ve only been on for a week, and we’re almost up to $2,000,” Williams said. “If we were to raise our $8,000 right now, we would probably break even.”
The students themselves have collected $2,500.
“The only involvement I have with fundraising is spreading the word on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media,” Kirsten Charlton, unit production manager for the film, said. “Most of my friends are broke, so I ask them to spread the word to their parents, and I ask my parents to spread the word to their friends.”
Budget considerations sometimes affect creative decisions.
“There are some things that the students want to do in the films—whether it’s special effects, whether it’s costuming—and we just can’t afford it,” Williams said.
Pecuniary concerns even had a role in the selection of the movie itself.
“The reason why I chose this story was that I knew it would be the easiest to finance,” recent graduate Bryan Kelly, who won the scriptwriting competition for the project, said. “Being that KSU Independent Films is housed on Kent State’s campus, it would be the easiest—or most frugal—to do.”
The horror genre itself entails special expenses of its own. Junior Jenna Kramer, who plays the ghost-character Emily, required eight identical nightgown costumes because of stains from the fake blood used in the scenes she plays. For the same reason, the company had to purchase a four-piece suit and extra interchangeable parts for Paul Shaia, who plays the dapper villain Mr. Yates.
“Wardrobe and food are probably my biggest costs,” Williams said. “We’re in our sixth week, and we’ve probably spent $3,000 on food. We actually had to start cutting down, like in pre-school, where they have a sign that says ‘five crackers.’ We’ve had to do ‘one burger’ or ‘one hot dog.’”
Although the group has struggled with its balance sheet, not all financial trends have been negative. “Now we have this digital cinema for fiction that students can do without a large amount of money,” Smeltzer said. “Everything is bigger, faster, cheaper. It’s one of the few fields where the tools of the trade are getting better and cheaper.”
Both Williams and Smeltzer are searching for ways to better finance the program in the future.
“If we started our own sort of organization where our films could at least travel to different universities and high schools,” Williams said, “that would be an easy fundraiser, and we’d really start seeing a lot of student work.”
Smeltzer envisions finding a way to sell the film.
“People make a lot of money off of movies,” he said. “How do we do that? We don’t need to make a lot of money. We just need to make a little money.”
The feature film project runs only every other year, and next spring and summer the program will concentrate instead on television production. Williams will be getting a break from filmmaking, and Smeltzer will be getting a break from the university altogether. He will be on sabbatical in Costa Rica—shooting a documentary.
KSU ASNE 