Casual, creative and comical are three words that can be used to describe sitting in on an MSU Filmmakers Club meeting. Everyone was in a light-hearted mood as ideas were being bounced off of one another.
President of the Filmmakers Club, media and information senior Connor Sullivan, ran the meeting, with club members coming up with plot ideas, characters, and set design for a horror movie influenced by the 1980s psychological thriller, “The Shining.”
Sullivan expects the movie to be completed sometime around Halloween.
“This is our third meeting this year. We’ll have a script by next week and hopefully shoot by October,” said Sullivan. Sullivan, who is in his third year in the club and his first year as president, said the club has a goal of making three or four short movies a semester. The club meets at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays in room A220 of Wells Hall.
“In years past, we haven’t been as productive as we’d like to,” Sullivan said. “Sometimes it’s just a lack of motivation or the project we were working on was too big.”
He said when doing 20-minute movies, it takes a lot of time to shoot, so the Filmmakers Club tries to keep films between five and 10 minutes to make more people happy.
Sullivan is still learning, but said he has been passionate about making movies for seven years now. He taught himself to write movies simply by going online and researching how to write screenplays. He even remembers the moment he realized he wanted to start making movies.
“Growing up, I always wanted to be a baseball player, and then sophomore year of high school, I got cut from the team,” Sullivan said. “That was the most miserable day of my life and I went home and I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, and that’s been my favorite movie ever since. Ever since I saw that, it just started off as a hobby, and I figured I might as well try to make a living out of it.”
Although getting paid to make movies would be ideal for Sullivan, he doesn’t plan on “being one of those guys that graduates college and goes to Hollywood with no money,” as he put it.
“I think it’s always going to be a hobby that I’ll look into,” Sullivan said. “I’d like it to be my primary source of income. If I’m working a different job or something then I’ll write on the weekends and I’ll show it to whoever will read it, and hope something happens.”
