The late Stanley Kubrick once compared aspects of filmmaking to athletic competition: “You can start with a game plan but depending on where the ball bounces and where the other side happens to be, opportunities and problems arise which can only be effectively dealt with at that very moment.”

With the help of their Spy Hop Production mentors, the ten young PitchNic film directors discovered the accidents that usurped their original game plans actually helped them understand precisely what Kubrick explained. Where in “Brother of Mine” (Ethan Pullan, Alek Sabin and Pat Thompson) Pullan initially had hoped to tie the story of his brother’s death from leukemia to that of his great-grandfather’s losing fight with cancer as a pretext for highlighting the high cancer risks Utah miners faced, he ended up with a beautifully told emotional film that visibly moved the capacity crowd in the Jeanne Wagner Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts.

Likewise, in “The Antagonist” (Daniel Pimentel, May Bartlett, and Kevin Lestarge), the project started with the challenge of situating Pimentel’s long-cherished doodle of a curious-looking character with a top hat in a workable story. The process of reverse engineering an effective fictional narrative required many pain-staking revisions that long ago dashed any familiar connections to Pimentel’s original intentions. The result was a smartly entertaining short film of postmodern fantasy – an irreverent, ironic, and relevant critique of those who think that fantasy and imagination alone can compensate for their dull lives.

The seventh annual PitchNic premiere demonstrated once again why Spy Hop Productions’ emerging national reputation as a powerhouse for youth multimedia platforms is justified. The quartet of films, each running under 20 minutes, were made by students, almost all of them in their teens.

Kudos, in particular, to Jeremy Nielsen, Spy Hop production mentor, and his colleagues for giving student filmmakers the confidence to convey their own sense of meaningful and emotional involvement without being preoccupied by the demands of originality at the potential expense of anything else in the process.

When viewed in the composite set, the films covered a widely diverse array of emotional impact. In “Destination: SLC” (Collin Griffith and Chris Carpenter), the filmmaking voice was compassionate, reportorial, and intelligent. Of particular note was the tone of Muhhamad Hasan, the young African refugee, who clearly was extremely shy and reserved on camera. However, in hearing the man’s voice-overs, the audience gets a sharper sense of his enthusiasm for education and the gateway it could provide. This is an effective counterpoint to the other voices representing the individuals who manage and counsel Salt Lake City’s sizable population of Somali, Bosnian, and Sudanese refugees.

In “Brains” (Loren Ruiz, Rachel Fairclough, and Britt Decker), the voice is savvy, witty, and ironic. Inspired by Max Brooks’ satirical book ‘The Zombie Survival Guide,’ two teenaged brothers decide to make a documentary about how to survive the apocalyptic disaster of a zombie invasion. The older brother, completely obsessed with the topic, is sadly inept both at the tactics of vanquishing zombies and at filmmaking, skills more firmly possessed by his younger brother, who tires of being constantly upbraided by his sibling. Meanwhile, the mother is a bit exasperated with the childish project her sons insist on continuing. The filmmakers cleverly drop in Brooks’ best pieces of advice: a machete (although the boys have to improvise with hedge clippers) as well as a complete sense of zen (observed only in the younger brother and, most surprisingly, in the mother). The ending takes the right turn, echoing Brooks’ urgent call: “Don’t be afraid. Use your head. And cut off theirs.”

Production values in the films enhanced many memorable moments. The descriptive, introspective, and intelligent voice of Pullan’s sister provided the emotional apex to “Brother of Mine.” The film’s editing followed a trajectory of the healing process of grief not only in the sincere voices of the Pullan family members but also in the physician who moves subtly from an aloof clinical voice to a philosophical, personal tone discussing the importance of love, grace and their bonds in the patient’s family.

In “The Antagonist,” the strange man wearing the top hat works so effectively in a narrative where he persists in attempting to get his author-creator (a slacker whose only passions seem to be junk food and television) to transform his character’s identity completely. The original music fits the surprisingly sparse, economical amount of dialogue in the film, which also includes the Burt Bacharach classic “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” From the tricycle with the Utah vanity plate “HatMan” to the scenes shot at a local laundromat (including the lead character sporting only his top hat and white skivvies) and Liberty Park, the film’s comedic absurdity was doled out consistently in just the right amounts.

These films certainly merit festival screenings and all of them should be entered in the Utah Short Film of the Year competition as part of the Fear No Film division at the 2010 Utah Arts Festival.

For more information about Spy Hop Productions, see here.