Quickie films in competition

You may have seen them in your neighborhood scouting for locations. Or setting up a shot in the middle of your favorite park.

For the last two weeks, dozens of local film directors, cameramen, actors, sound mixers and boom operators (they're the ones with big fuzzy mikes on a stick) have been working in teams of two to more than a dozen shooting 10-minute films for the short-film competition at the third annual Project Twenty1 Film Festival.

If the budding filmmakers look a bit frantic, even panicked, it's because they have been given only 21 days to write, shoot and edit their films, which must be completed by Saturday.

The films, all required to incorporate the theme or idea of light, will be screened at the festival, Oct. 4 and 5 at International House in West Philly.

Local writer-directors Stephanie Yuhas and Matt Conant founded Project Twenty1 two years ago to motivate other young filmmakers to keep making movies while coping with demands of families and jobs.

"We came up with the idea after we got out of college, and noticed that so many of our friends stopped making films," said Yuhas, 26, a 2004 University of the Arts graduate who works primarily in animation.

"You get married and get a job at Starbucks, and you realize you spent four years and $80,000 getting a film degree" that you don't use, chimed in Conant, 28, a Temple alum who makes ends meet by shooting corporate videos.

Conant said 21 teams entered the contest in its inaugural year, 2006. This year, it has drawn 33 teams from across the country, 25 of them from the Philadelphia area.

"This year we have entries from the U.K., Hawaii, Michigan and California," said Yuhas, who was born in Piscataway, N.J., to Transylvanian emigres.

Filmmaker Jose Cruz, 24, who lives in Elizabeth, N.J., traveled to his native Puerto Rico to film his entry, an ambitious mix of live action and stop-motion photography.

"I've been making films since I was a teenager," said Cruz, whose movie, "Lightweight," was shot entirely in Spanish. (Cruz plans to add English subtitles.)

"Lightweight" is a surreal tale about an overweight boy who wants "to lose weight so he can impress a girl he likes," Cruz said, adding that the film plays with the contest's required theme of light both in terms of "light and heavy as well as dark and light."

Old City couple Jeff and Liv Hatcher, married for 21/2 years, also mix genres with "Shadowplay," a film within a film that uses black-and-white animation and live action. Their movie shows a live audience as it reacts to an animated film made by the couple and projected on a wall on Market Street.

Northeast Philly-based writer-director John Rhee and his nine-member cast and crew are working on an equally imaginative and experimental project. Provisionally titled "Regenerative Life," it's "about a person who is born blind and undergoes a new procedure, which gives him sight."

Rhee, 30, who works in video production, said he would employ various visual effects to show the hero's unsettling visual experience.

While Cruz and Rhee see filmmaking as a future career, Van Nguyen, who recently earned a master's degree in management information systems from Drexel University, views it as a hobby.

"This is all for fun and games," says Nguyen, 25, a business analyst at Comcast, who last week shot some exteriors in the Powelton Village area. But Nguyen, who is working with a large crew and cast of 20, is a relatively experienced amateur filmmaker and screenwriter.

His flick, "At Best I Am a Beast," is a dramedy, with sci-fi and horror elements, about a scientist who creates biofuel using synthetically engineered bacteria. Things go wrong and the scientist comes down with a deadly disease. Can her son save her?

For three siblings from Mount Airy, the contest has been a great way to bond again after a long absence. Rita Pendergrass and brothers Ray and Keith Moore, who shot some key scenes of their entry, "Light My Fire," in Rittenhouse Square, were recently reunited when Rita, 28, returned after eight years in Tokyo.

A film and TV producer, who helped create a hip-hop show for Japanese TV called Cool Japan, Rita decided to help her brothers, who write music for films, try their hand at directing and editing a film.

"The film is kind of a horror piece" akin to the yarns filmed for Tales From the Crypt, she said. "It's about a guy who makes the wrong decision by cheating on his wife. His mistress is sort of a Baby Jane psycho lover."

Rita said the film, which "has really brought us together as a family," would have a surprise twist ending. Not to mention an explosion.

Genre films are particularly popular with the contestants. Pro filmmaker Mark Mackner, founder of the Crimson Zero, which is billed as "Philly's first and only punk-rock film collective," hits the horror-comedy vein with his entry, "Daisy Derkins, Dogsitter of the Damned."

"It's the story of an attractive young coed, who unwittingly accepts a job as dogsitter to Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades," said Mackner, who is shooting the film entirely in his house in Roxborough.

Co-organizers Yuhas and Conant said the October film festival, which will feature screenings of all the completed shorts, also will include a second program. Called the Philadelphia FilmAThon, it will comprise more than 20 features and shorts about any subject matter submitted to organizers by Aug. 21.

Yuhas said Polychrome Pictures would collect the best feature from the filmathon and the best short from the contest on a DVD to be distributed by Warner Bros.

But for Yuhas, the flash prize isn't what makes the festival. It's the impact on the Philly film scene that matters.

"We want to put together people from the community [including] actors, directors, writers and lighting people," she said. "And we want to help them market their films and put them in front of audiences."

Conant said he and his partner were negotiating with other indie film festivals across the country to swap and screen each others' films.

"Too many people make films which sit on the shelf forever," he said.