 "Photo: Ashley Inguanta")
In a small Orlando home, a bustling film crew goes dead silent for the man putting a Hot Pocket into the microwave. This scene fits into the vision for a feature-length film written and directed by a UCF graduate student.
Andrew Gay’s film, A Beautiful Belly, is his graduate thesis project, and the movie that could possibly get him started as a major motion-picture director.
This thesis project doesn’t end with a grade. Gay plans to take his movie to festival circuit and beyond.
“We’d love to be picked up by a distributor, but if not, we’ll distribute it ourselves,” Gay said.
The home, which was once the residence of Gay’s grandparents, looks like the domicile of a hip, Ikea-adjacent young couple with a baby on the way, right down to the vinyl records on the wall and hand-painted Noah’s Ark mural in the “nursery.”
After shooting and about a year of post-production, A Beautiful Belly will be a movie about an aspiring children’s entertainer whose life goes through dramatic changes in the face of imminent fatherhood.
Though it isn’t the first feature-length screenplay he’s written, Gay chose A Beautiful Belly to be the script for his first feature-length movie because it deals with topics that hit close to home for him.
Gay is 28 and married. Though he and his wife are not parents, Gay said he can relate to the weight of the issues faced by the characters in his movie.
UCF’s entrepreneurial digital cinema graduate track is one of the first programs where students make feature-length films for the graduate thesis project. The program is designed to take students through the creative, business and production aspects of film in three years.
Only a handful of students are accepted into the program each year. Gay is one of six in the second batch accepted.
Lisa Cook, UCF film professor, said some students see these feature-length projects as a potential calling card to careers in the movie business.
The program aims to prepare students for every aspect of the movie business by providing an extra emphasis on the business side. The program works with the College of Business Administration and includes upper-level business courses in the required curriculum.
The business training is put to use right away; the students themselves must raise all of the money behind the films.
“Raising money in this economy has been a difficult process,” Gay said.
The Web has helped the process along, allowing Gay to make contact with potential contributors over Facebook, Twitter, Indiegogo and the Paypal account attached to the film’s Web site. The project also has a detailed profile on IMDB.com.
Gay said much of the money in his movie’s budget came from friends and family. A Beautiful Belly also received funding from the Enzian Theater in Winter Park, which collects tax-deductable donations to dispense to local aspiring film-makers, but Gay’s funding isn’t all charity.
“We’re a private company, so we collect investors,” Gay said.
Michelle Roca, production manager for A Beautiful Belly and recent UCF graduate, has known Gay for three years and helped him gather a crew. On a given day of shooting, Roca estimates the cast and crew is between 25 and 45 people.
“The majority are students,” Roca said.
John Whitfield, senior in the film undergraduate program and gaffer for A Beautiful Belly, said he worked on the project because he wanted the experience and trusted the people involved.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” Whitfield said.
He, like much of the crew, knew most of the people involved as classmates and friends of friends.
Gay’s approach to the film isn’t just business.
“You can’t make a film [like this] unless people believe in you,” Gay said.
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