Two student filmmakers at IU have earned the honor of being invited to the 2017 Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes, France.
TJ Jaeger, an alumnus of the Media School, and Hunter Huddleston, a cinema studies major, received word of their acceptance in the Cannes festival for their film, “Lost Dog,” produced last year for Campus MovieFest.
“We freaked out because, honestly, Cannes is the biggest festival in the world,” Jaeger said.
Huddleston added that the nature of the festival, that filmmakers must be invited to apply for the festival, made it all the more exciting when they learned they were chosen.
“Less than 1 percent of individuals you ever meet in your lifetime have been asked to go because you’re invited to go to the festival. You can’t just say ‘I want to pay money and I’ll go,’” Huddleston said. “It’s a huge honor.”
“Lost Dog” is a short film that follows a man putting up fliers for his missing pet, Jaeger said. The concept was simple due to the focus on cinematography and attention to those details for the film.
“The reason ‘Lost Dog’ was so successful was because we focused in,” Jaeger said. “A lot of our past projects have been, ‘Oh, we want to do all these things, we want to do a feature-length film, we want to do this.’ When it’s just the two of us plus a handful of good friends helping us as well, it’s really hard.”
The total budget was somewhere around $30, which mostly went toward food costs for the friends who helped on the project, Jaeger said. Matt Leetz, an anthropology student, starred as the main actor in the film, and Julius Dolls, composed the score, and both friends attended the nation-wide Campus MovieFest finale in Atlanta with the producers. At that branch of the competition, “Lost Dog” was among the top five in the category of cinematography.
“We wouldn’t be able to make anything without the loyalty of our friends,” Huddleston said. “They genuinely come through for us, whether it’s acting for free or just helping do lighting and other stuff.”
The filmmaking process is largely collaborative, with an emphasis on peer respect, positive thinking and open forum for ideas, Huddleston said.
“Obviously we have to have a little bit of creative control, but we are always open to people suggesting things when we’re working,” Jaeger said. “We don’t want someone to be working on our film and just be like, ‘Oh, I just put the lights up, and they told me where to put the lights.’”
Jaeger said he and Huddleston have been co-producing films since high school, and Huddleston said the two plan to move to California after his graduation this spring. They are co-producers under the name Bemused Entertainment, a local production company.
“This is honestly something we’ve dreamed about since we were sophomores in high school,” Jaeger said. “The fact that it’s happening now, before he’s done with school and we move out of Bloomington – it’s crazy.”
“It’s kind of like that joke when you were a kid saying, ‘Wow, it’d be really cool if we went to Cannes someday,’” Huddleston added. “Now it’s actually a reality, which is crazy.”
Honing in on essential skills, such as writing scripts and feature-length screenplays, has been part of the process that brought the producers to where they are as filmmakers, he said.
“A lot of the films we made in the past were just leading up to the films we’ve made in the last few years,” Jaeger said. “We used to make a lot of projects for high school projects when we were first getting our bearings and using iMovie.”
One of the major challenges of getting from here to Cannes will be the funding for travel expenses and other amenities while abroad, Jaeger said. Some preliminary plans include appeals for funding and possibly a GoFundMe page.
Huddleston and Jaeger said they hope to apply for funding through the Media School to go to Cannes and show both current and prospective students what filmmakers who earn their degrees at IU can accomplish.
“We want to represent the Media School,” Jaeger said. “We want people to notice. We want future kids to say, ‘I want to go to IU. I want to be a filmmaker there.’ We want to show people that you don’t have to go to New York, you don’t have to go to LA to go to film school.”
