In 2013, Carson and Connor Einarsen made “Ryan Hood.” The 60-minute film cost $40. (They rented jackets for police officers).
Two years later, the brothers filmed “An Inconsistent Story in Stealing” here. That was more ambitious. Written by Carson, the neo-noir movie featured a former thief sucked back into the town she despises, to hunt down something she stole long ago.
With 17 speaking parts and 40 locations, it cost $4,000.
Carson (left) and Connor (middle) Einarsen, directing “Ryan Hood.”
Now Carson and Connor are moving up in the film world. “The Silent Beat” will be filmed in Georgia.
It’s more expensive too. The projected cost is $13,500.
Connor calls “The Silent Beat” “a live-action feature film that tells a small, intimate superhero origin story.”
The hero has incredible hearing. He listens to things no one else can, including an old radio that talks to him. When his best friend disappears, he dons a helmet and cape to get him back.
There’s a reason the young men are filming in Georgia. Carson — a 2012 Staples High School grad, and film and TV major at the Savannah College of Art and Design — now teaches film at Gatewood Academy, a private school in Eatonton.
Connor (Staples ’10, Carleton College with a major in cinema and media studies) is happy to travel south to help.
The new film was written — over nearly a dozen drafts — by Carson. He set it in the 1980s because that was a time of advanced analog technology. The world was about to go digital — but no one knew it.
“It was a time before total connectivity,” Carson notes. His characters are isolated — but not in the way modern technology has made us become.
In the ’80s, Carson says, “you couldn’t just pull out your cellphone and call someone. You had to talk face to face.”
He was not alive in the 1980s, of course. He used a writers’ group as “consultants” on the decade. (They told him, for example, to call a certain type of sneakers “Chucks,” not “Converse.”)
“The Silent Beat,” in the planning stages.
Filming begins November 27, and runs through December 20. When it’s done, Carson hopes it makes the festival rounds.
It’s perfect for those audiences: “an action-adventure film aimed at young adults nostalgic for the ’80s,” Carson explains.
You know: those days when life was so uncomplicated.
But before there was a YouTube to show his promotional video, and a Kickstarter website to help raise the $13,500 the young filmmakers need.
(Click here for a Kickstarter link to Carson and Connor Einarsen’s “The Silent Beat.”)
