Peter Gundling doesn’t know where the time goes. He’s been trying to finish his first film, a stop-motion animation called Toys, for almost eight months now. He tries to work a couple hours every day, more when he can swing it. And every day it’s the same thing. Just when he really gets going, and the lighting is just right, and the frames start clicking like clockwork, the doorbell rings downstairs and one of his friends tramps up to his attic studio. Or dinner is waiting on the table. Or, worst of all, his mother shouts from the stairwell, “Peter, time for bed!” and the day is snatched from his hands altogether.
If Peter were to write a textbook for beginning film students, it would say the point of making movies is so people can enjoy themselves, and understand who they are, and also make good use of their television sets. Keep the camera steady, he would advise, or the audience will get queasy. Use sticky tack on your props and they won’t fall down. Make sure your hands don’t get in the way of the camera. Be nice to the people you work with. Use suspense, like that scene in The Godfather where the horse’s head is chopped off and the guy wakes up and blood is dripping down the whole bed. Romance is when these two people are in love and kiss, and the movie will probably be PG-13 because it will have inappropriate scenes. Slasher films are about teenagers going in the wrong places. A producer is the person who makes or breaks the film. The most important directors of all time are Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and Art Clokey, creator of the stop-motion animated character Gumby. When you make a film, people can see your dreams, which can be kind of embarrassing.
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Every morning Peter wakes up at seven. “I don’t like sleeping in,” he explains. When he doesn’t have to go to school he heads straight to the attic of the tall yellow house where he lives with his father, Jerry, who is a research scientist, and his mother, Lucy, a freelance makeup artist. Jerry likes to say that their house is on the side of town where the firemen and police officers live.
Jerry showed Peter how to take a picture of an object with their digital camera, then move the same object a fraction of an inch and shoot it again. For sets and actors they used Peter’s prized collection of Legos from the 1960s and ’70s, which his father buys for him on eBay. He’s into things from the 70s. His favorite bands are Abba and Queen, and he cherishes a small blue typewriter in his bedroom that his mother used in college. Lucy did the voice of one of the characters, and Jerry edited the images in Apple’s iMovie program, under Peter’s direction.
Peter laughs harder at this, his voice rising to a high falsetto.
“Quiet on the set,” Peter cautions. Lego policemen from 1975 stand around on the poster board, waiting for their cues. He turns on the camera and arranges the police so they appear to be standing in a group and talking. He squeezes the cable release in his plump fist. The image of the gabbing cops is displayed in the window at the back of the camera. He shuffles each figure a centimeter to the left and takes another shot. “You have to care about what you’re making, really think about it, make it important, and then you can do it,” he says.
Kris Williams guesses the average age of an entrant to the Future Filmmakers Festival is 16. That’s why the submission form that came in with Toys caught her eye: the handwriting obviously belonged to someone much younger. Peter had included his signature at the bottom of the form, an unsolicited touch that made her laugh.
