Samuel: I'm the writer, director, producer, on WhatIf? Batman. It was a passion project. I'm Samuel Lee. It was something that I put a lot of heart and soul into for many years. It was something we did with my children's program. It's a non profit I have where we invite kids to sit and we let them shoot one scene a day. This was shot on a three day period so they did three of the scenes you saw. We actually shot it on a Bolex which was a 16mm camera. It was a learning experience. That was the whole kind of goal of the film, was to get these kids to have hands on experience doing actual film. I wrote the story myself. I spent about six years researching comic book characters, not really with a purpose and this is kind of what came out of it. There are a plethora of easter eggs, all kinds of batman references from all kinds of things. Obviously it's a flashpoint story, with the Thomas Wayne element. One of my uh, studio teachers is on. I'm not sure if she's, uh, watching or if she can chime in. But she also, we all had many roles on this film. We probably had a crew of about 20, so everyone was doing about three things a piece. A lot of industry professionals on it, and then a lot of up-and-coming people. I mean our students, we had a college intern. We had most of our students are about 10 to 12 years old. so they're pretty young. We had four that were on the film, they were kind of my star students. They had done multiple projects with us over the past we've done about an hour of content of short films for the past three years or so and we even hosted a summer camp in 2019 where they got to write and direct their own short film right before COVID. And we're growing! We've already made one more since this and we made one this year for Louisiana. And it's really exciting.


Interviewer: Fantastic, fantastic. So you went ahead and actually gave experience to those kids. How old are they to actually be a apart of this. 


Samuel: About ten. Ten to twelve. Some of them started with us when they were eight years old and been with us for about 2 years. We tend to get the middle school age children more. My originial goal was to get more high school kids involved, but it seems theyre uh distracted. Hormones, at that time, haha. But we have had a few high school kids, and a few college students. We actually had an infant on the last set, which was interesting. It was our first time to have an actual baby. My big thing I really do is teach parents the rules and regulations, and how many hours the children can be allowed on set. That's why we only let them shoot one scene, and maybe act in another if possible. Our focus is really the filmmaking side and not the acting side. We still let it if it's possible happen, but yeah, I mean, these four of them had been with us multiple times. Daniella, Stephanie and Devin. They're so smart, it's incredible to watch these kids in action and to see the parents watching their kids in action. That just, it can bring a tear to the eye. We've been lucky we've had some come to support us on this film. We had Wally Welch, he's a famous cowboy. He played Alfred. And that scene he's been in, I don't know about 100 flms like the magnificent seven. We also had Lorlei linklater, she's the daughter of director richard linklater. She played Harley Quinzell the pharmacist  So the story kind of came about um, I found a fan theory posted online. Like, what if batman was the crazy one, and he was in Arkham, and this whole Batman idea was something in his own head. To where all the villains are the doctors and the patients in the asylum with him. And so every character you see in the film is some batman character. We had Mr. Freeze playing the AC repair man, black mask was the warden, I Dr. Jonathan crane as the neurologist. We had the mad hatter as the hypnotherapist. I mean, the list goes on. We did a little twist on Joe Chill, I made him a mutant from the Batman Returns comics. And the lines. I mean, there's so  many lines that are pulled either from the movies or from the comics themselves. Mr. Freeze's lines is straight out of the comic book. Deadshot's lines, Slades' lines, the lines that are being spoken in the alleyway between Martha and Thomas are actually from Batman Brave and the Bold where Adam West voiced Thomas. So, I mean there's so many easter eggs you couldn't, you know, I couldn't list them all. I've lost count. But truly, I made it for the fans. I made it for true batman hardcore fans to get a kick out of. One thing I can say about shooting on a 1960s bolex camera is that it's very loud. We had a lot of ADR, a lot of sound problems that we tinker with constantly still. One of the workarounds that we did was we would roll sound on rehearsal, so we tried to capture as much ADR on set as possible. But still had to do some ADR in post and still couldn't work out all the kinks with the sound. 

Interviewer: Yeah I was noticing that as I saw the quality of the film. How did you actually get to you know, manage with the conversion rate to the HD platform here? 


Samuel: Sure! It's funny because the 2k scan of the film from Kodak was more expensive than the development of the film. Yeah. Film is an interesting medium. A lot of people are excited about 4k these days, you know, when they dont realize that a 70mm film is 16k. Um, 35 millimeter film, which they shot most films in the 80s and 90s with is 8k, and that's how all these old films are getting these 4k films and, uh, sorry i'm getting covid. Jordan's on the set, he's in the garage. Copy. Hey, Jordan Pepper's here for you. Yay! Never stops.


Interviewer: You never sleep


Samuel: Now we are working a Wednesday through Sunday shift on this Hulu show that I'm working on right now and luckily my POC is covering for me while I'm sitting in the production van.


Interviewer: Wonderful. Thank you for taking us. 


Samuel: Oh no, thank you for having me. This is one of the ones I was looking the most forward to. I had researched a ton of fan film festivals and so we were truly excited to be a part of this one


Interviewer: Thank you, thank you. That is very humbling.


Samuel: absolutely, when I went to do the crowdfunding we raised money on seed and spark and we raised about 15000 dollars online to shoot this film because of all the production design that was involved, how deeply complex I went with the costumes with the backdrops. And then to have the ability to shoot on film. And then, I insist on paying people, you know, so everyone did get some kind of pay and if they refused pay they got an associate producer credit. So you know, we cant pay a lot we can't compete with the union rates. But you know, we were shooting kind of in the middle of nowhere in Texas at this historic jail. So I just at least wanted pepole to not lose money by coming out and working on it. We did offer housing and a, well I like to think of it as a gas stipend instead of a daily rate, but yeah


Interviewer: That would definitely help, you know, in uh, Texas 


Samuel: Yeah, it's about an hour east of Dallas at this Anderson County Jail, it's owned by a local couple and their whole family lives in the jail. They all appeared in the film. The mom was, it was Catwoman. Selena Kyle. The son played Damine Wayne the bastard. And then the husband was one of the security guards, and the grandfather was the old man inmate pacing in the background of the group therapy scene 


Interviewer: Wow. So people actually live in this jail? 


Samuel: Yeah, they live there full time, yeah. it's a museum, and every Christmas they turn it into a Grinch themed fun house


Interviewer: Oh my gosh! That's amazing! 


Samuel: I had shot a feature there as a first assistant director I had brought uhh Gauthier. He was the dp on this film, on that film with me as a second aed. And the airbnb was so full, we decided to see if we could just sleep at the jail instead of sleeping at the airbnb. And we made friends with the family and JJ had talked for over a year about shooting something on film. And he had done eight millimeter rand I had never done film. And while we're standing there at the jail the grandfather pulled out a 16 millimeter camera out of the closet and that just sparked the whole idea. I was looking at the gothic infrastructure and I was like, you know, this could really be Arkham Asylum and uh, we really want to reuse this set, and you know, thats how I base writing my films and you know, I work with what we can do instead of writing something that will become impossible because i've been in films for so long that's kind of what i've learned over the years.


Interviewer: Well being that so you had i guess uh, you went ahead and mentioned that you use basically the flashpoint version of Thomas and Martha wayne. Um. I'm pretty sure people should know about it that already, it's a pretty famous animated movie. And uh, the comic books were amazing. When you designed the wife's smile, as you know in the comic book she does actually cut herself. Did you actually like I guess, envision the whit easl ike the pwoer that actually kind of heals the wounds and all that? or was it literally just supposed to be paint? Because either/or would have been like amazing to me because I never thought of that, you know, like in order to actually uh covera  cut. I've seen it before, you go right ahead and use you know some sort of powder to at least like you know help it heal because the wound won't actually close so you feel it so quickly depending on the gash. Well, the size of the gash. I'm so sorry, I'm just like overthinking this.


Samuel: No, absolutely, I did that prosthetic myself with my girlfriend's help. She was also one of our studio teachers. I'd sent you guys a time lapse video fo us applying it. I really just used the white to give it that joker-esque feel with the dark circles and then the spraying your hair green, you know. We really wanted to kind of keep that as the big reveal at the end. I hadn't thought of it like that of using it to like kind of cover up the scars. But I do know that martha wayne was the one that had the Glasgow smile, the one that inspired heath ledger. Unfortunately not that many people know about the Martha joker and it was supposed to be in the flashpoint movie before they weren't gonna do it and now they have done the flash movie and so my whole goal when iw as making this was =like 'Oh, we got to beat that movie. We got to beat it. I want to be the first live action matha joker out there' and so if they didn't know it i'm hoping this will introduce a lot of people to it. The film you mentioned, the animated version of flashpoint paradox, yeah, that kicked off those animated films and is ione of the biggest influences on the storytelling because that was what I researched. I watched everything animated for six years, from every cartoon show to every movie. Marvel, DC, dark horse, whatever. because that's our kind of next goal, we want to do a cartoon in the future. Yes. So that's so much I could just ramble on. 


Interviewer: No please, I love the rambling I usually have to ask like as many questions as possible because you know filmmakers, they're creatives, and a majority of creatives are introverts. They prefer holding the camera and writing the script to you know, just acting, and to have somebody so verbal is just a rarity so thank you.


Samuel: Another thing I did with the film was I went to six flags where uh Warner brothers you know has the DC rights, and I sat next to the batman ride and wrote the story at the park, and I used the energy of the people around me to kind of help influence you know me writing a story because it had been in my head with all this stuff i've been accumulating and putting together and i'de come up with the basis in my head. A lot of it I took straight from these fan theories online that I found this what if batman and so, to answer the question if anyon'es curious but is the what if batman is the crazy one, you know, what if alfred was the dad that was kind of a big big twist and then uh just what if. There's so many possibilities. And that's kind of I put that amalgam comics animation at the beginning which a lot of people don't know about. There's a time in the late 90s period where they amalgamated dc and marvel where they had the comic book characters come together and they had sort of them sharing the page but they also combine characters. There's a character called dark claw which is wolverine and batman put together. Yeah, it's kind of one of my dream stories, that was what I was thinking about doing with my cartoon possibly on the story ideas.


Interviewer: it's wonderful. Yeah I remember those comics, I especially love the romance between Jubilee and Robin. Those are fantastic. I love those scenes.


Samuel: They even have the same color scheme, it's hilarious


Interviewer: Yes! Oh my gosh, I remember it was like so funny to actually see. 


Samuel: Yeah. And I threw that in with robin uh you know, that little color scheme with this hat and his undershirt and his little details, all the characters in my film 


Samuel: Interviewer: Thank you for that. That was quite nice actually, it was a good touch. Loved it. Um. What was one other question I had? Who was your cameraman? Like? I don't think any of your kids actually got to touch that camera did they or? 


Samuel: Um, I brought in a DP from uh, Atlanta georgia. I worked on this feature called sebastion and the second I was telling me about how he was making a western and that he shoots everything on 16 and I was like oh that's funny i'm producing this film and I need a 16mm camera. So I hired him right away as the camera operator. His name escapes me, it's at the top of my head. But he was a student, a grad student, at scad and he was about to do his thesis project for graduation and westerns are kind of one of our specialties that we've been making with the kids. That's what they made in summer camp. And also we've been making fora  few years before that. Gosh, I wish I could think of his name right now and I wish I had a call sheet to pull up. But like, JJ Gotheir who was my director of photography, he was someone i've been working with for a few years. He edited this film too. He was the one that was pushing to do a 16 millimeter film and so he was kind of in charge while the owner of the caemra was my camera up. It was a bolex, and uh, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the 16s but that's kind of like a classic trasure that people are kind of get wowed by whenever I mentioned that. They're like 'oh wow!'. The one thing I can say is it's super loud, it makes a lot of noise. I wish I'd learned that to cover it with a sound blanket while they shot something someone told me later a way I could have reduced some of the noise was just to kind of smother the camera. But it's interesting. I belive it cost about...we shot to a four to one ratio with the film meaning we had four times as much film as the final edit would be so since the film was supposed to be around 12 minutes long we had 48 minutes lenght of film that we bought. I want to say it was about $400 for the film itself and it was about $400 for the development. But it was another 500 for the 2k scan, we had to ship it to Atlanta and they gave us quite a deal. They gave usa  student rate so i'm sure it actually costs a little bit more than that but they're actually are really willing to work with anyone and they, there's only a couple houses that actually still develop film. I believe the other one is in burbank and near LA, I think there's one in uh New York as well. But it's kind of a rare thing to find. What else about it's it's the goal. We've done a lot of 48 hour film projects over the years and uh we were curious on how to do film in a 48 hour period and what we learned was to do 16 we would have to shoot in a city with same day developing like atlanta or la but we could shoot eight milimeter and develop it in buckets ourselves and then we could project it and capture the projection with a DSLR and scan it ourselves, so it was really a learning tool not just for our kids but for pretty much everyone on set besides our caemraman that uses these all the time, but that was the goal you know? I'm working today and I spoke to the cameramana here and he's like 'oh i've never done film you know' and here we are on a hulu show and it's just. It's rare these days.


Interviewer: When dealing with the lighting in such a close proximity, how were you guys able to manipulate that? 

Samuel: I mean, I rented a full lighting package from one electrician that works on like fear the walking dead out of austin. He gives us a great deal as well. We covered a lot of the windows because everything was supposed to take place at night. We shot nights truly it rained pretty much the whole time we filmed, which was fun. But I just have to give it up to my key grip and staffer, christopher joseph knight and his team that just shaped and manipulated it and worked in the confined spaces we had, having shadows trhough bars, having top source light, trying to make things dramatic and really. Allen Childress was my cameraman out of Atlanta. Alan Childress was his name. The camera owner. My studio teacher just commented on the thing. Elisa, are you on the call? Can you chime in? 


Elisa: Yeah


Samuel: This is Elisa Ruiz, she's one of our studio teachers but also one of our amazing chefs. She supplied all the craft services and catering on this film. Can you give a little bit about what we've done with the kids and kind of your perspective on this thing that i've been dreaming and making? 


Elisa: It's just amazing. As a teacher, I work in classrooms with kids all the time but to see the just in a weeekend be able to learn something new and then put it into practice like see them actually doing it? It's just amazing. These kids have learned so much and it's just wonderful to see. 

Interviewer: what kind of problems have you had cooking for us and anything like that any problems that you've had, just hurdles?


Elisa: I mean, there's always things that pop up, but i mean like it's just sometimes there isn't always a place to cook where we are and so like, trying to find somewhere else to do things and then bring it over but like on the batman side I had so much fun. Like, I took over the kitchen in the jailhouse and for me it was like one of the best weekends i've had in forever. And then there's so many people are always willing to help out. you're like 'oh let me help you bring this out let me help you here.' Everybody works together on these sets and stuff. Everyone works to help out everyone. Everyone wants us to succeed, so everyone just does whatever they can.


Interviewer: What are some of the questions that your kids actually have asked you in this whole process that kind of stuck out to you? I mean, you've got them growing not only as adults or children to be adults someday, but also as talents. 


Samuel: One of the best questions that I will never forget we were making a film and the small girl turned to me and asked if we were shooting in the rule of thirds and my heart melted. We've done intensive training with these kids, we've explained storytelling and how to break down a story itself, we've talked about camera, we've talked about angles, we've talked about all kinds of things. We have them do sound a lot, we have them on the boom pole, we've had a mix usually we'll take our brightest and we'll have them assistant direct, we'll have them call roles, we'll have them call cut, we'll have them kind of run the show. Then we tend to put our youngest on slate and let them call slate on the last film we did. Our older child pulled focus on the shot because it was a rack focus shot we were doing so they have done it all for questions they've asked. You know, everyone wants to know how to break in and so I had it really kind of like a bootcamp. And I just explained to people that you know, to work on the big time union films you have to start as a production assistant now and that's something no one taught me. After ten years, I thought I was a big time director before I even know what a PA was or an ad was and so it's just teaching them things they really need to know to be on a professional set. We have walkies, we've taught them how to talk over them, how to copy and you know, call for things, and change channels and whos on what channel. We did a film that was all animals with a voiceover. We had Ben Stein play a donkey voice on that one. He's one of our supporters. He gave us a small bit of money that we used on our last film we just made. So when working in the industry full time professionally like I do I kind of like to tell people that this is kind of my philanthropy, it's my way I give back to the community. I was trained early on that if I didn't do free films forever I would stop growing. I always needed to give back and do something so this whas kind of what I started. After losing a lot of friends after trying to teach my freinds how to work and them realizing that this isn't for everyone, so these kids that we've got? This is something that they're really passionate about. Not just them, but their parents are also very passionate about what we're doing and they want their kids to succeed, you know? I'm trying to teach them a career, a profession. I explained to them, you don't need to go to college to do this but I encourage them all to go to college to get a good set of life skills. Telling them to take something easy, not film itself but do humanities or something. I took finance which was very difficult, but it's helped me a lot when it comes to producing and managing large endeavors.


Interviewer: That's brilliant. Well done sir. No, I do understand that, especially with the losing friends part. Entertainment in itself is really hard work, it's intense. It's not a nine to five and it requires a passion, you know, people have to believe in the project in order to actually keep it going, and it's confusing to people because obviously everyone wants to actually earn the money like right after they clock out, and film itself sometimes takes the end of production or even three months after it's even released and the royalties actually do pay themselves off. They do. So. Well done. I'm very happy that you actually chose a fin film to actually teach kids. I was just a filmmaker because, how do I put it? A lot of people have a hard time relating to independent films when they don't know the source, they don't know the artists, they don't follow that tred, and fan films actually is a good bridge to actually allow people to just recognize the characters already and when they see the movie, no matter who makes it, they're willing to actually talk it's a community. And that is a pretty good thing for anybody in any age, so thank you for that. Thank you so much. 


Samuel: Thank you


Interviewer: If you have any more words of encouragement, before we move on to the next film.? 


Samuel: Just, persistence is the key to this business. If this is what you want to do, do it. My dad didn't understand for 10 years and it wasn't until I could pause the television and say 'look dad it's my name! in the credits!', haha. It's not for everyone but it's a great business. And uh, hopefully we'll be seeing you again soon with something else that we do.


Interviewer: Well I look forward to that, thank you so much elisa, thank you samuel, and have a good day. Please enjoy the festival. 


Samuel: Thank you, we'll be here .