TDHS Grad Wins Best Picture at The 48 Hour Film Project
By Cole Goodwin
The Dalles, Ore., October 11, 2023– The Dalles High School Graduate Asher Young and a team of nine other individuals including Director Wade Fisher, and Actor Casey Emmerling won Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director at the Portland 2023 48 Hour Film Project.
The global event occurs in more than 100 cities around the world and challenges filmmakers to make a movie in a single weekend. Teams draw genres out of a hat on Friday night. The teams were also assigned certain elements such as Tour guide character named Rudy Markham, an air pump, and the line “I think it’s you.”
Once they have their genres in hand, teams must race to write, shoot, edit, and deliver their final project by Sunday night. This requires teams to clearly define roles and hit the ground running pretty quickly.
Asher Young.
Young, age 19, a Cinema Studies major at the University of Oregon, wrote the screenplay for the film. He said it was a lot of pressure to produce a script with all the required elements in one evening.
“We had this setup where we were all in a garage at a table, and I had my laptop plugged into a big TV screen and I was writing it in front of everyone for like six hours on that first night,” said Young.
“So the genres we got assigned were romance and social commentary which were kind of restricting genres. My friends came back and they were upset because the team that went right before us got Horror and Buddy Comedy which are super easy to work with…We only had a couple of actors and both of our leads were straight men and neither of them were comfortable with not being straight in their roles,” said Young.
So, the team decided on social commentary, but that too was a tough route.
“It can be really difficult to do well. There are a lot of bad satires out there. So, that’s something we had to keep in mind,” said Young.
That’s when the inspiration came to do social commentary on true crime.
Their film, Maniacs, is a seven minute comedic social commentary that follows Rudy (played by Casey Emmerling) a tour guide and an avid true crime fan after he accidentally stumbles onto a real life murderer (played by Mitchell Hampton) in action.
A still from Maniacs.
“We wanted to take a look at the way some people interact with or produce true crime in the modern day. Because True Crime is having a moment in the last year where there were shows about Jeffery Dahmer and these horrible serial killers in a way that is harmful and damaging to the people that have been hurt. So we wanted to have our social commentary be about the glorification of crime and human’s morbid interest in murder and death,” said Young.
“The point of making Maniacs was not to shame people who are into true crime, and we hope it doesn’t come across that way. It’s more of a chance to talk about the way we consume true crime and how some of those ways are not very healthy,” said Young.
Without spoiling the ending for readers who still want to watch the film (video available at the end of this article)…I’ll say that In the end of the film, the murderer and the tour guide kind of swap roles.
Another still from the film.
“Over the course of the film our goal was to show Rudy becoming more and more into this, and seeing it as sort of living out the fantasy that he’s always had. So, at that point in the movie, he’s sort of taking control of the situation because he thinks he knows best and he’s just sort of gone completely off the deep end at that point,” said Young.
After the film was complete. The team headed to the theater to view each team’s entries and hear the results from the judges.
“When we were at the showing in Portland a couple weeks ago, we were watching all the other films that could have contended for best film. And in our opinion there were a bunch of them that were probably more deserving of it than us in terms of quality and what they could accomplish. One of them was this really good comedy film about these old actors who were in a Sci-fi tv show, who get kidnapped and forced to make the finale of the show that they never did and it was shot really well and the acting was super funny, super good, and they got second best film and we felt really bad about it because that was our favorite one. We we’re really hoping they would win,” said Young.
Still they had hopes for their own team as well.
“The whole time we were sitting in the audience like, oh god I hope we win something and then we got the three biggest awards at the very end,” said Young.
Young said that organizers felt that their film, Maniacs, best represented Portland.
Thanks to their win, Young and his team, the Schaffer Kid’s will be headed to the 2024 Filmapalooza in Lisbon, Portugal. If they manage to take home a win there, then it’s off to the world renowned Cannes Film Festival in France.
“This film was made in 48 hours by some passionate film makers. We are insanely grateful and honored for this opportunity. We've had the true honor to meet and stand on stage with some of the most talented people we will ever meet. Thank you a million times to everyone involved in the Portland 48 Hour Film Project ; organizers and filmmakers. We love you all. This is crazy, we're all going crazy. Thank you, Schaffer Kids,” reads their message on Youtube.
To watch their film visit click the link or view the video below.
Full credits on the film are:
CAST
Rudy Markham - Casey Emmerling
Murderer - Mitchell Hampton
Jogger - Wade Fisher
Podcaster (voice) - Max Cameron
Victim - Henry Schutt
CREW
Director - Wade Fisher
Executive Producers - Andrew Schaffer and Spencer Jones
Co-Producers - Brooklynn Kelley, Samantha Sause, Katie Fisher, Max Cameron
Director of Photography - Henry Schutt
Writer - Asher Young
Support Local News
Make a difference in your community by supporting local news.
