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Thursday, August 2, 2007

Filmmaker Breaks the Mold

By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
    After five years, Kevin Ulrich's all-consuming hobby involving clay figures with paper-clip skeletons helped him get into a college film department.
    And he learned something about filmmaking, too.
    "It doesn't matter what's actually there, it's what it looks like," said Kevin, a 17-year-old who lives just west of Edgewood.
    Kevin completed a feature-length fantasy film using characters he created with skewers, a few office supplies and clay. The whole production cost him about $1,000.
    The film, along with high test scores, helped him get into the film, TV and radio program at Biola University, a Christian school in Southern California.
    To create the film, which he completed July 25, Kevin set up scenes with his clay creations— people, sheep, elves and trolls— and shot a few frames of film using a small, well-used video camera on a tripod. He would then move the figures incrementally, taking a burst of film each time.
    Kevin would stage grand scenes involving his creations: fights between elves and with giant bears, discoveries of chests of gold, duels with enchanted swords or even grand battles.
    Kevin worked out of a bare, windowless room about the size of a large closet in the basement. His main stage was constructed on a desk, with a few lamps for lighting, at the far end of the room.
    A racks of props, clay figures and art supplies sat near the door. A short bookcase held a row of neatly labeled videocassettes— Kevin's preteen films, which he made using Legos.
    He said the most difficult scene in his most recent project was a battle involving 300 figures.
    For that scene he reduced the scale, animating thumbtack-sized people.
    "Three hundred little bitty guys fighting ... that was really hard," Kevin said.
    As he moved them to set up each scene, the tiny clay figures would slowly disintegrate, he said.
    To shoot 30 seconds of footage in the large battle scene took him six days, working 10 hours each day, he said.
    Although that was the most difficult scene to shoot, the work he put in for the week was nothing out of the ordinary— Kevin has had that kind of schedule for the past year. He had the time to spend on the project because he'd completed his home-schooling a year early.
    While working on his film, he has also been taking tests to fulfill some of his college credits through the College Level Exam Program.
    His mother, Donna Ulrich, who has home-schooled all of her five children, said Kevin "doesn't do relaxation."
    Unlike many parents with teenage boys, she said she wants her son to simply relax in the two weeks he has left before college.
    Kevin also wrote a 250-page fantasy book, using a universe created by his brother, Brian Ulrich.
    "He actually started the book-writing thing," Kevin said of Brian.
    Brian is almost done with his second book, in what he plans to be a 15-part series.
    According to Donna Ulrich, all of her five sons are precocious. Their interests range from film and books to meteorology and solar panels.