Kellams: It is Friday, albeit a Friday where temperatures are peaking over 100 degrees in many areas. But still, it's Friday and this is Ozarks at Large. Thank you so much for spending part of this hot Friday listening to our program.
Arkansas Cinema Society's film festival Filmland continues through Sunday. This week we've heard from a few filmmakers featured in this year's event. Now one more. Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis connected with Levi Coppedge, a now graduated John Brown University student filmmaker whose new short film "Finger Guns" screens at the festival today. He says the short is inspired by childhood imagination.
Coppedge: So "Finger Guns" is about a kid who escapes into his imagination to avoid his chores. And in his imagination, he sees himself as a cowboy or an outlaw in the Wild West.
Travis: Cool. Where'd you get the inspiration for this story? And how do you visually take us there?
Coppedge: Yeah, yeah. So in terms of the inspiration for "Finger Guns," I just really love the idea of being able to capture that kind of childlike imagination. And originally the idea was just a kid imagining himself fighting with toy guns and stuff. And in his head, it's much more real.
So how I visually captured that was we traveled to New Mexico and we shot all our Western portions within an hour radius of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and multiple different scenic locations and mountains and desert and everything around there. And then all the real world stuff, where the kid is having to do his chores, is here in Arkansas.
Travis: Very cool. You shot this on location? Wow. How is that traveling as a student filmmaker all the way to New Mexico to shoot these scenes?
Coppedge: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of moving parts. I first came up with this idea two years ago, so there was a lot of time that I gave myself to be able to go out and location scout and be able to budget out what I would need for food and gear and to be able to pay actors to be out there.
And so it's a lot of moving pieces, but I gave myself the time to be able to chart it all out and make sure I wasn't forgetting anything. Nothing that would... There's always going to be stuff that surprises you on the day of filming, but I made sure to minimize that.
Travis: Yeah. Tell me about one of those surprises, perhaps a challenge that you had to overcome.
Coppedge: Yeah. So I already knew that New Mexico at the time of year that we were going was going to be super windy. But I didn't really account for how windy it would be or how that would affect costumes.
So we had to deal a lot with hats flying off in the middle of the desert, because of the amount of wind that would just push them off right in the middle of a take. So we had to stuff the hats in and make them a little tighter. Or we would have to just make sure that we were waiting for the wind to die down in order to capture a take.
Travis: What did you learn from the process as a whole, specifically for how you like to tell stories?
Coppedge: In terms of the whole process, what I learned is just that filmmaking is just being told, you tell your story in multiple different ways over the whole process. So there's first coming up with the idea, then there's writing it. And then it becomes a whole different movie whenever you're actually shooting it. And then again, it transforms whenever you're editing it.
And then finally there's the version that people see that is completely different from what I originally came up with, but it's a whole process of essentially allowing it to grow into what it should be, which is very fun.
Travis: Yeah. Are you pleased with what it grew into?
Coppedge: Very, very. Yeah. The collaborative part of it is just, I like allowing some people to have input into the story. It really took it from what I thought was already a good idea to then being, I think, executed very well.
Travis: Awesome. Well, just really quick, before folks can see this in person, what do you hope they take away from this? This is a story about maybe childlike imagination, but it's got to be a little bit more than that.
Coppedge: So really, it's... I mean, it's about childhood imagination, but also you have to kind of allow yourself to essentially reconnect with that. The whole process of me making this was a process of reconnecting to what I was like when I was younger as well.
And I think that it's very easy to lose sight of just very fun parts of getting lost in creativity and in dreams as well. It's a thing that I think is very easy to lose touch with. So my hope is that people are able to reconnect with a little bit of that aspect.
Kellams: Filmmaker Levi Coppedge, speaking about his student short film "Finger Guns" with Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis. If you missed the screening at Filmland, don't worry. It will also be featured at the 17th annual Fayetteville Film Festival, taking place Sept. 16 through the 19th. You can go to fayettevillefilmfest.org for more information.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
