Lucas Parker and Walter Seals sat across from one another while a friend spun a wheeled office chair with a camera on a tripod mounted to it. For six hours, the Georgia Tech students struggled to get the timing right as the camera’s rotation sped up and slowed down to capture their brief conversation.
With dawn approaching, they finally succeeded. And now the young filmmakers are reaping the rewards.
That complex scene is one of the key moments in Math: The Musical, a five-minute short film produced this spring as part of Campus MovieFest.
The national organization runs competitions at participating schools across the country, crowning a champion at each campus. The student filmmakers have just one week to shoot and edit their film.
Math (which, despite its name, features nary a song-and-dance number) won the Tech contest, earning its creative team an invitation to the national festival in Los Angeles. In June, Seals and Parker drove cross-country to Hollywood, where they attended filmmaking workshops, networked with other winners and screened their film in front of a live audience.
Their experience began when Parker, now a sophomore science, technology and culture major, saw a flyer for the contest on campus. Adapting the storyline from a play he wrote in high school, Parker recruited Seals (a sophomore industrial engineering major) and another actor, Nathan McCurry, to star in and produce the film.
In the short, Parker (at left) plays Francis, a young man who questions his love for math. His journey of self-discovery is aided by a “Drug Slingin’ Math Friend” (Seals), and a “Pythagorean Stoner” (McCurry, dressed in tie-dye, and later in a toga).
Parker said the team spent much of their weeklong shoot trying to incorporate inventive camera work.
“Every time we came to a new scene it was, ‘OK, how can we do this?’ We messed around until we came up with something,” Parker said. “‘Offbeat’ was definitely a major theme.”
The process wasn’t without its headaches. Seals said the team almost hit a breaking point when it came to the spinning-camera scene.
“It was really late at night and everyone was getting frustrated,” Seals said. “But when we went to Hollywood that was what most people talked about—how impressive it was that we got [the scene] in one shot.
Seals and Parker have a busy schedule ahead. They are already at work on a music video starring Atlanta rapper Marc DeCoca, and both plan on making more short films together, though only as a hobby.
For now, neither student is thinking too far down the road.
“I’m just going to keep doing as much as I can while I’m in school,” Parker said.
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