(Okoboji)– Passersby will notice quite a bit of activity this weekend on the lot at the Okoboji Summer Theatre. Chase Thompson is the Associate Professor of Filmmaking and Program Chair with The Conservatory for the Performing Arts at Stephens College, which owns and operates Okoboji Summer Theatre. Thompson says he and some crew members will be shooting a short film Saturday through Monday at the Okoboji Summer Theatre lot. He says it’s titled “Sleep Between the Stars”…
“This is an alien movie. We were researching some areas up there and things and there’s an old 1993, maybe, X-Files episode that takes place in Okoboji. It’s a little different but it kind of grabbed our imagination to think about well, what if we continued that and get a modern version? So yeah, we’ve got a little suspenseful, alien film that might have some humorous moments in it too that we made specifically for that location and we tasked a couple of locals and we are ready to come up with a bunch of gear and do our best to make that script come to life on the screen.”
Thompson says “Sleep Between the Stars”, along with some other short films, will be shown to the public at 7:30 pm Tuesday, April 8th at the Pearson Lakes Art Center…
“We’ll be shooting Saturday, Sunday, Monday and then we’ll get a really rough cut put together and we’ll get it as fast as we can polished for that Tuesday night screening. We’ll also have some other films that we’ve collected along the way here. One’s called Tampsen Air, that’s undirected but it’s got a local favorite, Rob Doyen, who plays the main character in that one. So yeah, I know the people up in Okoboji love Rob Doyen. He’s one of the best people to ever don the stage there. Then we’ve got another premier film, by Kerry Yost, called Ethel, and that one we’ll be getting hopefully feedback from the audience because it has it’s premier coming up later this month, so there’s final touches going on that, so their feedback would be very useful. And then we’ve got a student film called Gladis about a jet ski that almost killed one of our students. It blew up while she was riding it and it’s her story about it. It’s fascinating. Then we’ll have a rough cut of once we get it put together for Sleep Between the Stars.”
Tuesday’s showing at the Pearson Lakes Art Center will be free of charge and is open to the public.
