Insomniacs
By Kaleigh Maher, staff writer
Posted on January 11, 2007

A team of five SMAD students were under the gun to put together a 15-minute movie in 24 hours, and in the end, the insomnia paid off.

 There were 215 films entered from 90 different universities, and all the films were put online and voted on by the public. Then, the 25 most popular movies were evaluated by judges, who included SMAD professor John Woody (though he abstained from judging any of the JMU pieces), “Saturday Night Live” cast member Fred Armisen, “Full Metal Jacket” star Matthew Modine and other prominent figures in the television and film community.

“It was obvious after viewing so many of them that it was such a great piece,” Woody said.

The week before the competition, which was sponsored by Apple, JMU juniors Nathan Burns, Peter Dwyer, Robert Kramer, Lauren D. Meyer and Sierra Neal Years met to brainstorm possible ideas. On Nov. 11 at 5 p.m., they crowded around Dwyer’s computer waiting for the requirements to be posted online. From there they had 24 hours to create a three-minute film with ice as a prop, a character named Alex Kona and the line “you don’t know what it’s like growing up here.”

“As soon as the rules were up, we started organizing, writing and planning for the rest of the night,” Dwyer said.

By 10 p.m., the script was complete and the team moved to downtown Harrisonburg where they shot until 4:30 a.m. Burns then went to write the score while Dwyer took some of the extras home and Meyer, Neal and Kramer began downloading their shots.

“The music was a big part of the movie because we only had dialogue during the last line, the score had to be moving,” Burns said. “Luckily we were able to write a very satisfying musical score.”

Burns’ roommate Josh Schmidt helped write and record the score adding strings and piano. 

“I think that the music and the aesthetics of the film really went hand in hand to create a beautiful piece,” Meyer said.

At 7 a.m., the team met in the SMAD video lab to edit the film. After working all day they barely made the deadline uploading their final piece around 4:45 p.m.

“It got to be around 3 p.m. [Saturday] and I was fighting to keep my eyes open,” Dwyer said.

Meyer said it didn’t leave the team time to “rationalize” and discuss their decisions. “We had to commit to something and move on.”

Even if they had been allotted more time the group would not want to make changes to “Speechless.”

“The funny thing is, after the deadline passed and we submitted our finished product, we didn’t want to change a thing,” Neal said. “We were strangely satisfied with everything. It’s strange because each of us is a perfectionist and a ruthless critic.”

The film, “Speechless,” juxtaposes an older style of silent, black and white, films with a modern world where communication consists of text messaging.

“Our film comments on our generation’s communication evolution into a digitalized world — what better way than to use a silent film style?” Meyer said.

“Speechless,” follows the character of Alex Kona (McLean Fletcher) as she and her boyfriend get into a fight and the communication she encounters afterward. “I was thrilled and amazed they could come up with something so complex in such a short time,” Fletcher said. “I was nervous about how I was going to convey emotion without speaking.”

The rest of the actors and crew were friends of the production team.

“Making this movie wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our friends who stayed up until almost 4 a.m. to be in our movie,” Kramer said. “They did this without pay and without complaint.”

“Speechless” can be viewed at http://streaming.smad.jmu.edu/insomnia/Speechless.mov.