Last Updated: Wednesday, Feb 25 2009 7:52 AM
It was shot in two weeks at Frontier High School in the middle of summer 2007, with no air conditioning and security alarms going off from time to time, among other production problems.
“Stamped!” is a feature-length film shot entirely on location at Frontier High School. It involved the work of English and filmmaking teacher Bryce Hatch and about 30 students who volunteered to work on the production. A red-carpet sneak preview will be held Friday at the Fox Theater downtown. Admission is $6 and proceeds go to the Frontier High film department.
“Stamped!” tries to show the difficulty high school kids have in breaking down the social barriers and stereotypes with which they are often labeled or “stamped.”
The filming of “Stamped!” The filmmaker is eager to spread a family-oriented message with his art.
It spent a year in post-production, as cinematographer/producer/film editor Andrew Waite worked alone on getting it down to its final 97-minute length on evenings and weekends — between his bread-and-butter jobs of filming local television commercials. “Going into it, I thought it was going to be a lot easier,” Waite said. “Now that it’s over, I can’t believe the day has finally come that it’s being premiered.”
That day is Friday at the Fox Theater downtown, where, Waite said, “searchlight, paparazzi, press board and red velvet ropes, limos, the whole nine yards,” will be ready for a public sneak preview screening of “Stamped!” a local labor of love written and directed by Frontier High English and filmmaking teacher Bryce Hatch.
In the film, Hatch tries to show the difficulty high school kids have in breaking down the social barriers and stereotypes with which they are often labeled or “stamped.” “I’ve been teaching for 13 years,” the 35-year-old said, “so all the ideas pretty much came from everything I’ve seen.”
Some 30 Frontier students from the school’s film department volunteered as crew members, extras, even caterers — with the help of some of their moms and dads, who brought food to the set. A grateful Hatch called them “home-grown volunteer people who wanted to help make a movie.”
The biggest expense was paying for the movie’s main actors, most of them Los Angeles-area Screen Actors Guild members.
According to Hatch, when movie executives consider buying a film for distribution, “they don’t really focus on the storyline … or the special effects. They focus on who’s in it. It was smart for us to go with as big of a name as we could find, with the limited funds that we had, to try to be able to make the film sell.”
And Hatch, a Mormon who has written some eight other family-friendly screenplays free of what he calls the “formulaic” sex, nudity and excessive violence common in mainstream Hollywood films, is committed to making “Stamped!” sell.
“The film ‘officially’ goes on the market (after the premiere) to be sold to the highest bidder,” Waite wrote in an e-mail. “It has a good chance of being ‘picked up’ by a distribution company such as Lionsgate, Fox Searchlight, IFC, Castle Rock, etc. Most likely a straight-to-DVD release, but you never know.”
Hatch and Waite also hope that among those attending Friday night’s screening of “Stamped!” will be potential investors of other projects on which the two are teaming. That includes “R&J”, also written by Hatch, which Waite describes as “a modern-day ‘Romeo and Juliet’ set in today’s high school.”
Shooting is set to begin locally in July, Waite said.