Bellevue 'Rocket Man' low budget, but high-tech BCC project

With their dry ice, homemade rocket pack and model cars, they seem like neighborhood kids putting on an extravagant backyard science-fiction production.

But this Bellevue Community College class project — a 1940s-style film called "Rocket Man'' — is low budget but high-tech. And it's an example of how students can create their own movie studio with inexpensive digital video equipment and a computer.

The result can be movies as visually and aurally — if not as dramatically — arresting as a Hollywood feature film but for a fraction of the cost.

The BCC production, no relation to the Walt Disney film of the same name, is the hands-on project of Oscar winner and professor Mike Korolenko's filmmaking class. The 25-minute feature was shot last weekend and should be finished by October, when it will be screened at the college and sent to film festivals.

To make the project possible, the college has invested about $11,000 in the past two years on three digital video cameras.

The class and some volunteers spent many hours shooting last weekend, transforming Korolenko's script into cinema, bringing the main character, Rocket Man, and his quest to save heroine Christian White to the screen via digital videotape.

Each of the 28 students has a role to play — actors, production designers, sound and light crew, special-effects engineers.

Production designer Skyler Munro built Rocket Man's jet pack by rummaging through a recycling yard, where he found fire-extinguisher tanks, zip ties and an old automobile valve cover to create an eerie likeness to '40s sci-fi trappings.

Christian Lind arrived from France two years ago to learn how to make movies. He's the line producer, who oversees all aspects of the production, making sure the director's artistic vision is brought to life.

When Daniel's Broiler atop the Hyatt Regency Bellevue hotel unexpectedly decided against allowing the crew to shoot there, Lind had to look for another location. Management then rethought the decision and allowed the shooting, much to Lind's relief.

Assistant director Crystal McAlerney says she's going to be a producer someday and will hire Lind to be her line producer for every movie. She's going to Sydney, Australia, in January to learn filmmaking at the University of Technology.

Like many of the students, McAlerney goes to school and works full time — in her case at an insurance company.

Meanwhile, Korolenko brought actors to campus to shoot a scene with a 1953 Triumph Mayflower, which its owner, Dan Brown of Renton, calls a poor man's Rolls-Royce.

A classic-car show on campus couldn't have come at a better time and made procuring the car easy.

The heroine is played by Bonnie Hall, who, with a shimmery, sky-blue dress and thick hair, is a dead ringer for Rita Hayworth.

Korolenko's movie resembles a 1940s pulp serial and is intended to be an examination of how Americans viewed themselves, their heroes and their villains during the World War II decade.

For the students, there's more to the film than learning the technical aspects of moviemaking. Korolenko is a teacher first, the type whose students want to sign up for whatever he's teaching next semester. He seems to use the class partly to enlighten students about the future of media.

Over lunch at Billy McHale's, where a few students were unwinding with cocktails, Korolenko tells them they must take responsibility for the future.

"The new technology can be used for education or for propaganda," he says. He quotes H.G. Wells. "We're in a race between education and destruction."

Korolenko has been studying the relationship between technology, media and violence since the 1970s. He won an Oscar for a 1979 documentary called "After '45," in which he examined how television had changed political perceptions.

In another class, "The Technology of Propaganda," he asks students to examine the techniques of propaganda, from Leni Riefenstahl's film "The Triumph of the Will," made in Nazi Germany, to more subtle ploys used in modern advertising.

"I question everything I see now, especially TV," says actress Hall, who is studying digital animation in hopes of working on films such as the "The Matrix."

Korolenko, who says he views teaching as a subversive activity, is hopeful. "People in their 20s, if you really listen to them, I find much more serious and open-minded than students even 10 years ago," he says.

His students have a special responsibility, Korolenko says, because they will be in the forefront as lowered costs widen the ranks of filmmakers.

"It's not the printing press, it's the typewriter. This technology is something the students can own themselves. For between $5,000 and $10,000, they can own their own studios," he says.

"These guys are going to create a new art form."

And, Korolenko adds, the Web has made reproducing, marketing and distributing that new art form cheap and easy.

Alas, technology remains imperfect. Back on the set, a microphone isn't working, so Korolenko tells the actors, "Everybody: Places! Listen, when you say your line readings, really yell them out because the mic isn't working."