EagleCorps: Movie Magic

Rebecca/EagleCorps: Hello welcome to Eagle Corps, a weekly podcast produced by the Talon inspired by NPR story for Rebecca Oddes, and today we’ll be talking with Bob Emrich and Sawyer Nicole about their experience with filmmaking at Oak Park High School.

Sawyer and Bob:Hello, my name is Sawyer Nicole and I’m Bob Emrich, and so today we thought we’d talk about just filmmaking at the school. So first off we both take Mr. Hunt’s film production class, and Bob has made some movies recently that I really enjoyed. So could you tell us about the one you did first this year.

Bob: The first one I did this year was called a day of the races and it was a silent film with Lucas Joseph and Matthew Mitchell and Cameron church. And that one did pretty well. It went onto the film festival without one. But yeah, it was just like a typical silent film about a guy chasing a girl and then at the end, he doesn’t end up getting the girl and there’s humorous antics in the middle of it all, you know.

Sawyer: And then moving on, what do you do for this last film, the documentary.

Bob: This one I decided to work solo and I did a mockumentary, kind of Wayne’s World type thing called straight villain which is about the band that I’m in that is called Cheech villain. It’s like beats chillin but you flip the letters and. Yeah, that one was all pre-written even though it’s still kind of a documentary, and that one’s probably one of the ones I’m most proud of in my history of filmmaking so hopefully that one does well too but we’ll see.

Sawyer: And so filmmaking at the school, were you inspired by like other films you’ve watched or was this just like other interests.

Bob: Oh yeah. Well, most recently I’ve tried to take a lot of inspiration from films that I see especially with like, I don’t know stuff like soundtracks and stuff like that. Like I read about how various directors choose their soundtracks and I tried to do the same thing with that. And, but I don’t know filmmaking for me it’s just something I’ve always done since I was like, literally four years old, my parents got me a little toy camera and that’s just been my thing ever since.

Sawyer: And then you are actually part of the band too and so how does your experience with music and film ever worked together.

Bob: Absolutely. I’m actually in charge of the park music archives, which is just a collection of all concert videos constants that happen at the school, but I saw I throw those up when I can and then also for video announcements if we’re trying to plug an event that’s coming up in the program. I’ll make a video with my friends about it and that’ll make it on the announcements

Sawyer: And so would you like to talk about the perfect omelet, which was like the first ones I think

Bob: Yeah, well the perfect omelet actually started back in summer with Lenny, Lenny carob you know best human on this campus, said Hey Bob like let’s let’s, I got a video idea let’s make a video where some guy just makes an omelet. And it’s a really quiet relaxing video but when he sits down to eat it it’s just these horrible loud unsettling noises, and we made that one summer night, and the first night that I posted it. I remember I stayed up till like five in the morning because the video just blew up, it got like 200 views between like 9pm and 5am just that first night. So we decided to do a video announcement based around the perfect omelet once the year started.

Sawyer: And what did that announcement end up being for?

Bob: I was for the music at the movies concert, the first band concert of the year where we played a click track and you watched the movies.

Sawyer: And so we actually we recently went to the room together. And so, and you definitely introduced me to this whole new world of the room and just kind of do you say, what did you enjoy about bad movies almost as much as good movies and what’s like the cutoff or what’s so bad.

Bob: I don’t know I feel like every bad movie has some sort of following with someone, whether it’s like a nostalgic attraction or they enjoyed it personally and other people didn’t. But for me, I’d have to draw the line at Samurai cop that movie has such a cult following but I could hardly sit through the whole thing. But the room Yes The room was definitely, definitely so bad it’s good film that, to me at least never gets old.

Sawyer: What about movies like The suit? Have you seen Suicide Squad. Yeah, like, that’s like a big movie that was just really bad, but would you find that enjoyable or is it only really these smaller movies.

Bob: Well, for me, that’s why I said some people enjoy. I actually did kind of enjoy Suicide Squad when I first saw it, but for people who thought it was bad. That’s just like, yeah, like I could see how it was bad.

Rebecca/EagleCorps: Thank you for listening to this week’s Eagle Corps podcast. Stay tuned for more updates weekly. If you’d like to be involved in a podcast, feel free to sign up for an interview session by clicking the link below. We’d like to thank NPR for being the inspiration of this podcast, as well as Tony Peluce and Bob Emmerich and Sawyer Nicole.