If you’ve ever experienced that awkward phase of your life, you’ll understand the total meaning of the indie sports comedy, “Intramural,” that has earned a key spot at this year’s Tribeca/ESPN Film Festival in New York City.
You know, the gnawing problem that has faced any male or female who has become comfortable with the balance of play and work in those five plus short years of college and that eerie unknown world beyond graduation, marriage, career and debt.
That just about sums up the plot of the 98-minute crowd-funded film written by Bradley Jackson; directed by Andrew Disney; and produced by Russell W. Groves, Bradley Jackson, Andrew S. Lee and Red Sanders.
Central character Caleb Fuller struggled with the age-old problem of continuing to rebel and was faced with the awesome responsibility of conformity. The demarcation point for Fuller was obvious – an intramural football game to top every game in his years at college.
Ralph Smyth Entertainment’s Jackson wrote the screenplay back in 2006 while a film student at the University of Texas.
The script was a rollicking and over-the-top love letter to the sports comedies of his youth such as “Remember the Titans,” “Rocky” and “Mighty Ducks.”
Coming Alive
Even though he was finally finished with a script he thought was a solid hit, it sat on the shelf until he had a chance meeting with Andrew Disney in 2011.
“I’d seen Andrew’s first feature film ‘Searching for Sonny’ and thought it was not only hilarious, but also showed an amazing sense of style. I knew he’d be a great fit for the script,” Bradley commented.
Andrew said he was hooked on the project on his first read of the script. “The script made me laugh out loud and it felt like a movie I’d actually want to see and quote with my friends. Directing it seemed like a no-brainer.”
Fully committed to delivering an audience-winning film on their first effort, Bradley and Andrew didn’t have much difficulty in signing up his production team including Jeffrey Waldron as cinematographer and Kody Gibson as editor.
Pitching the idea of developing the world’s best intramural sports film ever (it’s also the only one to their knowledge), Bradley and Andrew assembled their Austin-based film with a superstar cast including “Saturday Night Live’s” Kate McKinnon, Jay Pharoah and Beck Bennett, “The Office’s” Jake Lacy, and “Twilight’s” Nikki Reed.
The Storage Queen
The filmmakers knew that they wanted to shoot the movie in 5K. What they didn’t realize was how much RAW (uncompressed) storage was required when shooting in 5K.
The production – RAW, post work and final cut – consumed more than 20TB of OWC hard disk storage.
At the end of each day, the digital content was immediately delivered to Gibson and his staff who worked on it through the evening. As a result, when shooting was wrapped, Andrew said the movie was almost fully assembled, except for polishing … a whole lot of polishing!
“All the money, time, sweat, blood, and tears are stored on those hard drives.” Andrew commented. “We created triplicates of all the drives. We kept two copies of each drive in Austin and sent the others to LA. That way, if an asteroid destroyed California, we’d still have our movie in Texas. You have to think about every scenario where the drives could be lost or destroyed because all the equity now lives on them.”
Gibson noted that he used a wide range of high-speed drives, mainly those with the new high-performance Thunderbolt interface which was designed specifically to handle high-volume throughput from the Mac Pro – especially when working with 5K content.
The production crew choose OWC as their drive of choice. “OWC drives are amazingly reliable. We used twenty-seven drives on the shoot for “Intramural” and not one failed,” Andrew noted.
Premiere
Bradley and Andrew were excited that “Intramural” had been chosen by ESPN during their special Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival sports day on April 26.
The two said they are also working on other screening dates around the country at the numerous indie film festivals. They are also looking into domestic and foreign distribution and discussing a theatrical release and a 10-15 city college tour to promote the film.
