Even among 15-year old filmmakers, junior Anna Ivanisevic stands out. For one, she shot her first feature-length movie with no previous experience. For another, she’s the movie’s writer, director and actor of half of the main characters.
Ivanisevic and her co-producer and co-star, junior Hammond Cole Sherouse (the Arts and Culture Editor of the ECHO), dove straight into production of “Things Go South” in the midst of virtual school last year.
An eccentric three-hour experience, the movie is filled with joshing banter, whimsical visions and quirky characters. Sherouse and Ivanisevic play themselves as Hammond and Anna, but things quickly devolve from a typical sophomore year when Hammond shows up at Anna’s house one winter night, tells her that he is a genie and convinces her to drive him on a petty-crime-fueled roadtrip to a obscure road in Florida.
Ivanisevic described the film as “hectic.”
“There’s a lot,” Ivanisevic said. “Lots of things fall apart. Lots of people fall over. A lot of nonsense occurred on set.”
Sherouse said the conception of the movie stemmed from their friend, junior Shay Wisdom, moving to Florida, combined with the Google Maps discovery of a Florida road called “Genie Place.” Creativity and research developed the plot from there, leading to Genie Lane, Genie Court and even Somalia.
“We found other roads that had ‘Genie’ in the name, and then we just wrote it out from there, and then eventually [the story] became clear,” Sherouse said. “I’m [acting] a horrible person and she’s being led along as my accomplice on all these crimes.”
The genie and his friend’s crimes include semi-robbing a Marxist ATM in South Carolina, voice acted by Wisdom, swindling luxury hotel rooms and murdering a limericking hiker, played by junior Annie Curran. Like the progression of the plot, the lawlessness heightens in intensity.
“It’s sort of a shift from the surreal to the absurd,” Sherouse said. “At the start you have comedy that’s pretty based in reality, like, an ATM that gets sentient and hates capitalism, or a gorilla mascot gets defensive over merchandise. And then toward the end, Anna breaks into somebody’s house and crawls around on the floor as we eat blue macaroni and cheese, and then we go to a psychedelic dreamscape, and she is swallowed by a rabbit. Hopefully people find it funny.“
Similar to the plot of the movie, the soundtrack is eccentric but carefully considered, representing both writers’ tastes, with songs like The Band’s “Ophelia” and Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings.”
“If you take the time, I don’t know why you would want to do this, [and] look at the lyrics and look at where a song is placed, I think it tells you something about the movie,” Sherouse said. “We definitely were very intentional about that.”
WIth little budget for props and set production other than what Ivanisevic and Sherouse could find around their houses, the cast is also composed of friends and family who could be convinced to join in. The mythical genie goddess is played by junior Cece Harrison, and the angry gorilla is played by Sherouse’s godmother, who agreed to don the hairy costume Ivanisevic owned in the dead heat of summer to chase their car around.
Junior Tal Lucas was walking in Cedar Falls Park one day when he saw Ivanisevic and Sherouse filming, and was assigned to play the role of a passerby seeing the madness unfold.
“I’m not very good at [acting],” Lucas said. “All I say is, ‘Those kids look crazy.’”
Like Lucas, Ivanisevic and Sherouse began with no movie experience. They tested out free WeVideo editing software, borrowed Sherouse’s family camera, and began shooting the script. Practice and Premiere Pro, a birthday present, improved their quality.
“Eventually we figured out, ‘Oh, there’s a setting that shows you what’s in focus, isn’t that useful.’ So we definitely learned as we went,” Sherouse said. “We had different skills, and I think the main thing that we learned was how to manage our time and how to get organized. So by the end we were just a machine. At first a scene would take us like a whole week to get and by the end, we were just spending a day on something.”
After 10 months of scripting, filming, editing and perhaps some magic of their own, Ivanisevic and Sherouse premiered their movie on YouTube Sept. 18.
“If you have enough commitment and enough stupidity, you can do crazy things,“ Sherouse said.
Photo courtesy of Sherivan Studios.
