Let the 'Games' begin: Oklahoma filmmakers show their successes at deadCenter Film Festival

Lance McDaniel likes to say that this year's deadCenter Film Festival will feature 135 films made by moviemakers from Alva to Australia.

The executive director of the state's largest cinematic celebration, McDaniel is providing the Alva connection with his 10th deadCenter selection, a short film called “The Homecoming Trilogy” that he made in his Oklahoma hometown.

As deadCenter continues this weekend at multiple venues throughout downtown OKC, McDaniel isn't the only filmmaker featured at the festival who is creating exciting and innovative work right here in the Sooner State. Some of the homegrown projects showing at deadCenter are generating state, national and even international buzz.

“There's several Oklahoma filmmakers that we have watched grow, and it's been really fun,” said Sara Thompson, deadCenter's director of programming. “I definitely think that the quality (of Oklahoma film) is improving, and I hope that it helps that the filmmakers can come to the festival and see work from around the world, not just what their friends and fellow Okie filmmakers are doing.”

Here are three rising Oklahoma City filmmakers who will be showing their work at deadCenter:

Ryan Bellgardt

Writer, director and producer of “The Jurassic Games”

Showing: 7 p.m. Friday at the Devon Theater at Harkins Bricktown Cinemas 16.

Ryan Bellgardt actually credits deadCenter with inspiring his filmmaking career.

“I went to deadCenter and saw … ‘Ecstasy of Gold,' it was a Western, at deadCenter probably 10 years ago,” Bellgardt recalled. “I remember seeing the film and the director got up and talked about it, and I just thought, ‘I want to be that guy one day.' It was inspiring.”

His third film, “The Jurassic Games,” mashes up multiple Hollywood hits — “Jurassic Park,” “The Hunger Games” and “The Matrix,” to name the most obvious ones — in a thrilling and even thoughtful actioner as death row inmates compete for a chance for freedom in the controversial game show of the movie's title. They just have to survive a VR obstacle course of velociraptors, saber-tooth tigers and, of course, their murderous fellow inmates. Hollywood actor Ryan Merriman returned to his home state to play the unscrupulous host of “The Jurassic Games," while local actor/filmmaker Adam Hampton stars as a wrongly convicted family man.

“I think it's really cool to be able to know in advance that, yeah, these movies are going to be released all over the place, and Adam Hampton is going to be seen overdubbed in Chinese,” Bellgardt said with a laugh.

Unlike many independent filmmakers premiering their work at deadCenter this year, Bellgardt isn't trying to secure distribution for his latest project. “The Jurassic Games” already has it and will be released Tuesday on Digital and July 3 on DVD from Uncork'd Entertainment.

“The way that I'm making movies now is we're trying to make what are called international sales movies, and they're movies that are appealing to these big, broad audiences. We knew before we even wrote this movie that we were going to make a dinosaur movie. And we knew that it was gonna have convicts in it — and we knew that because of research, because of talking to distributors and buyers,” he said.

Bellgardt said he made his first feature, 2013's sci-fi time-travel tale “Army of Frankensteins,” in his spare time and, fortunately, it was a movie that sales agents happened to be looking for. Galen Christy with High Octane Pictures found it, sold it and signed Bellgardt as a client. When he set out to make his next movie, the 2017 creature feature “Gremlin,” the Oklahoman went to Christy for advice on how to make it a success.

“I learned that you can make money doing this if you make the right type of movie — the right type of movie being something that is appealing not just to the United States but everywhere else, too. ... That's why stuff like horror and sci-fi does really well is because they're very primal and easy translatable,” he said.

His next project, “The Adventures of Jurassic Pet,” also will involve dinosaurs, but it will be a family-friendly teen adventure, again filmed in his home state.

“Companies are now hiring us directly saying something like, ‘We want a dragon movie. We know you guys can do it because we've seen “Jurassic Games.” ' ... So, they're really excited about it because it's a movie that they need and want, and then I'm excited because I get to write and produce a dragon movie,” he said.

“I don't want to sound like ‘Yeah, we've totally sold out, and we have what we're doing.' That's not it at all. I mean, I love what I get to do. And I'm making the kind of movies that I want to make — with the idea that one day I'll be able to have a ginormous budget to get big stars and have a 100-people effects team work on my dinosaurs."

Bellgardt has hosted the world premiere of all three of his films at deadCenter, and he said he plans to remain loyal to his hometown fest.

“It's an incredible festival … that makes Oklahoma City seem like the coolest place to be able to have a festival that 30,000 people attend,” he said. “There's nothing better than the feeling of sitting in a theater of 400 people watching a movie and all those people are rooting for it."

Laron Chapman

Writer and director of “You People”

Showing: 6 p.m. Sunday at MidFirst Bank Theater at Harkins Bricktown Cinemas 16.

For the first film project he could call his own, Laron Chapman created a timely and deeply personal dramedy that delves into issues of identity, sexuality and race.

“My mom's always told me that I don't have small ideas. Everything's always been huge," he said with a laugh. “Honestly, I don't think I could have written anything else for a first film because it's lifted directly from my own life experiences as a double minority.”

A black man and a member of the LGBTQ community, Chapman centered his narrative on Chad (Joseph Lee Anderson), an intelligent, whitewashed black college student who was raised by Caucasian parents (Michael Gibbons and Cindy Hanska). He has a crisis of ethnic identity when he falls for Melanie (Gabrielle Reyes), a black classmate with a strong activist streak.

“I've often been told by some of my friends that ‘You are the whitest black guy I've ever met.' And they say that and I don't think they realize I don't take it as a compliment because it's like you're negating a whole part of me — or you're equating my intellect or what have you to being white," Chapman said. “That conversation just always fascinated me, so I wanted to kind of weave that into a narrative of sorts.”

Chapman gained his initial moviemaking experiences as a production assistant on various Oklahoma-made projects, including “American Idol,” “Rudderless” and “Wildlife.” While working on “August: Osage County,” he not only met Meryl Streep, but he also figured out what he wanted to do with his life: make movies.

Although his initial draft was “‘Lord of the Rings' long,” Chapman said he took the script through several rounds of painful revisions.

“The film went under a huge evolution even for me, because I realized that I'd kind of … fallen into the trap of doing the same things that I was speaking out against,” he said. “At one point, the Amber character was just the hot girl. She didn't have much of a subplot. She was a plot device for the most part. And I realized at one point, you know, that's something that you see all too often in a whole host of movies. ... I realized that I had the ability to change that."

Embarking on his first crowdfunding campaign, Chapman was surprised when he raised $32,000 of the $40,000 budget.

“It seemed to resonate with people. Strangers donated to it. I would watch the numbers increasing and I realized, ‘I might actually be able to make this movie,'” he said.

He hopes that “You People” garners lots of laughs and plenty of reflection as it makes its world premiere at deadCenter.

“I feel like more than ever, this is what people are talking about,” he said. “I feel like my film, in some small capacity, could be a conversation starter.”

Kyle Roberts

Director of “The Grave”

Showing: In the Okie Mediums block at 2 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday at MidFirst Bank Theater at Harkins Bricktown Cinemas 16.

When Kyle Roberts met Oklahoma Film Icon Award winner Mike Mitchell at the 2017 deadCenter Film Festival, he had no idea he soon would be following the glitter-festooned path Mitchell created with his 2016 animated hit “Trolls.”

One year later, Roberts is hard at work creating a series of five stop-motion animated “Trolls” short films for the DreamWorks TV YouTube channel.

“This series is going to be a whole other level that people can expect from our stop-motion stuff,” Roberts said. “This time we actually made puppets for it, similar to what Laika (Studios) does with ‘ParaNorman' and its other things. It was the first time for us doing that, and it's been a whole crazy thing. Each puppet is like 80 to 100 hours to produce.”

Roberts is taking a break from his latest stop-motion venture for this weekend's deadCenter festivities.

“I think every year except for last year for the last five or six years I've had a film in deadCenter. Some of them were music videos and shorts,” he said. “It's been great to have that in our backyard: this great festival to be able to either premiere or screen films and have a good audience reaction to it.”

The live-action short film “The Grave” is the latest collaboration between Roberts and screenwriter (and The Oklahoman Features Editor) Matthew Price, best known for their award-winning feature film “The Posthuman Project.” A film-noir comic-book movie set in 1920s Oklahoma City, “The Grave” follows journalist and World War I veteran Walter Crim (Rett Terrell) who takes up the mantle of a vigilante and takes on a crime lord played by “The Jurassic Games'” Adam Hampton.

Besides bringing Price's crusading character to life, Roberts said one of his goals with “The Grave” was to get back to San Diego Comic-Con. In July, “The Grave” will be his fourth project to be featured at the San Diego Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival, and he hopes sell the crime drama into a series.

“The one thing that everybody has been saying is they want to see more,” Roberts said. “The Grave is just a really cool character. That's another thing that everyone says, that they're really interested in learning more of the back story of The Grave and what makes him tick.”