News

2 young filmmakers win top prize by reviving a lost art

By Billie Dunn

CATSKILL — Two local filmmakers will be honored Sunday during the final hours of the ninth annual FilmColumbia Festival of Film. And they are both under 15 years of age.

Over the summer, Harley Muller, 11, and his friend Dayton Rutkowski, both of Catskill, attended the Children’s Media Project (CMP), a Poughkeepsie-based arts and education organization focusing on media and technology.

The organization aims to create a teaching and learning environment where artists, educators, community activists and youth can learn to interact with the media arts as creators and viewers. And this summer, that’s precisely what Muller and Rutowski did.

In their three minute and thirty-second film “The Burrito from Mars,” a claymation mutant Ninja burrito finds himself on the streets of New York City. The film follows him on a stroll, where he sees a dog walking a man, Godzilla knocking airplanes out of the sky, and a giant squirrel. Eventually the burrito passes a Taco Bell, where he meets a taco he likes. The taco joins the burrito on his journey, and they meet a surprising demise.

As with most movie plots, this, too, is all about a girl. Well, sort of.

The boys created the film with a group of other youth filmmakers during a summertime animation workshop with CMP. Together teaching artists and students focused on the creative uses of paper, clay, and other 3D objects to create stop-motion animated movies. The students learned to make backgrounds and figures, create movement, tell a story visually, and create soundtracks.

Examples of claymation can be seen in the “Wallace and Gromit” series and in the feature film “Chicken Run.” Claymation is a cousin of stop-motion animation, the painstaking process by which a rubber model is moved and filmed one frame at a time. The best examples of this technique — a lost art in the age of CGI — are Willis O’Brien’s “King Kong” and Ray Harryhausen’s “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”

Harley Muller and his mother Margo were in Chatham when they came across a flier looking for children 15-years-old and younger who’ve made a film and with the permission of the CMP they submitted the work.

FilmColumbia began on Thursday and ends Sunday. Muller and Rutowski’s film will be shown the last day of the festival, at the Crandell Theatre in Chatham, where most of the festival’s screenings take place.

Crandell Theatre is Columbia County’s oldest and largest theater. Located at 46-48 Main Street, the theater seats 534 moviegoers, and has remained basically unchanged since it was built in 1926.

“The Burrito from Mars” is scheduled to debut on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. and Muller and Rutowski will be recognized as the first-place winners of the Young Filmmakers Contest, in the 15 and younger age group.

Muller was surprised to learn that the film won the top prize.

“I went to CMP last year and had a really good time, and I wanted to do it again this year, but I wasn’t planning on entering any contests,” he said.

After the film festival Muller plans on getting his own video camera.

“I just want to keep making movies,” he said.

For a complete festival schedule, visit http://www.filmcolumbia.com.

To reach reporter Billie Dunn, please call 518-943-2100, ext. 3323, or e-mail bdunn@thedailymail.net.

Reader Comments

Submit a Comment