Look, Ma, I made a movie!

July 17, 2004

By Sarah Klein

Tall, lanky, a tad shy, Dan Casey seems your typical college student, and the CCS senior’s apartment in Detroit’s Cass Corridor bears all the trappings of your typical college bachelor pad: piles of laundry, the occasional battered movie poster, a coffee table full of cookie crumbs. In Casey’s bedroom, a rumpled mattress on the floor sits directly across from an elaborate computer console, the screen filled with frozen images.

This is Casey’s film studio. At the tender age of 22, Casey is an independent filmmaker with four feature films under his belt — and he just snagged national distribution for the fourth, a crime thriller called The Passage. Across the country, a legion of young filmmakers, in living rooms and bedrooms just like this, are cutting their teeth as filmmakers. Many produce subpar work that will never see the light of day, and even much of the good work may be doomed to obscurity. But some filmmakers, like Casey, seem to be poised on the brink of major success.

The signs of the boom are on theater marquees. Last week The Brewster Project, a local indie film starring music figures such as Paradime and Regina Belle, screened at the State Theatre. The Second Coming, another Detroit production, recently screened at the Masonic Temple. One local theater manager reported that some months she receives up to 20 screening queries. Film festivals are happening regularly, among them Detroit Docs (for documentaries), Planet Ant’s festival, the Michigan Independent Film Festival and the Motor City Film Festival (Aug. 12-16).

What is propelling this activity? The recent advent of cheap and readily available digital video (DV) cameras and the accompanying editing software.

Welcome to the new millennium of independent filmmaking — where you can make your own feature film for less than a grand, and edit it at home in your underwear. These days, everybody and his brother can make a film — and they are — but will it be any good?