ARE YOU THE REALITY OF MY IMAGINATION?

ARE YOU THE REALITY OF MY IMAGINATION? Color, 3 minutes, Super 8mm, Sound - 1972

<- Click image to see a crude VHS clip from the film

I shot this film during my junior year in high school. The story is of a student (played by myself) who feels ridiculed by his classmates and decides to bring a gun to school to kill them. I filmed different scenes around the school with my friends by skipping out of our classes and setting up clandestine shots. For the sequence where I shoot the 3 students, I had set up 3 friends with cameras stationed around the entrance to the main hallway to cover the action. We had only one chance to get this shot since I had not bothered to get the schools permission for any of this. I had arranged for a get-a-way cars to be ready to evacuate the camera crew once we completed filming the shot just in case we all got caught. If I pulled this off, I needed those cameras to be safe and away from the school. The timing for this shootout had to be right when a majority of the students would be heading back to classes after lunch. I also had given the 3 other actors little packets of ketchup to hold and hit themselves with when I fired the gun at them. We had no idea how the students would react to a gun going off amongst them, so were where apprehensive. Looking back, I was lucky that I was not able to get the PE department to lend me the 22 caliber starters gun as a 'prop'. I had to use a toy cap gun which did make a good amount of noise, but not as loud as I had hoped. In the end I was very pleased with how it all turned out and in viewing it just the other day, I was taken by the fact that my short film was conceived 27 years prior to the real events of the Columbine High School massacre.