Professor to make short film

Courtesy photo | Doane University
Professor J.B. Tyson

Many majors require real-world experience. For example, education majors need to have student teaching experience, and physical therapy majors need to work with mannequins before they work with actual people. The same thing could be said about students who study film.

J.B. Tyson, a film professor at Doane, has put together a group of sophomores, juniors and seniors who will help him create a short film.

“For this film I wanted it to be about seven to 10 minutes long,” Tyson said. “This is a film about a man who was stranded out in the middle of nowhere and it’s just a very slow burn. There’s only 17 words in the entire script but it is very heavy.”

Tyson explained how this year he will have a crew of 15 students compared to what he had last year, which was only two. Along with that, he described how this project will only require about six to seven hours or even less to film.

“I did that on purpose,” Tyson said. “This film is the polar opposite of what I shot last year. This one is all exterior and will be shot during the daytime, compared to last year where it was all interior and all during the nighttime and had a running time of three and a half minutes long.”

After this film is completed, Tyson is planning on submitting it to a film festival where he hopes it will get approved compared to last year when his film got rejected due to how short it was.

“This isn’t like a TikTok video or an Instagram post,” Tyson said. “This is an actual story that I am telling from beginning to end. TikToks are very fast and very quick where they use the basic premise of filmmaking, but actual film has a different structure.”

Tyson plans on shooting this film in mid-July, which will give him about two months to edit before submitting his work for the film festival before mid-October.

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