Jefferson film society releases TJ remakes: Terminator 2
The Jefferson Film society stands on stage, celebrating the release of “TJ remakes: Terminator 2.” The release date was delayed past the intended viewing during the summer, with it only making its debut Nov. 12. “I’m so happy with it. When we first thought of the idea it was more of a pipe dream, and with [the difficulties] getting started finally getting to see it in the auditorium was magical.” Toro said.
November 22, 2021
TJ remakes Terminator 2, Jefferson film society’s newest work, hit the big screen on Friday Nov. 12.
The remake was created by the film society over the summer after ample deliberation over the genre of the film.
“We went through a bunch of ideas. [We thought] about doing a horror movie or a Sci fi movie. [Eventually we picked this because we thought] it would be easy for people to recreate while having fun and having different avenues for interpretation.” Senior and film vice president Eli Lang said.
“We wanted an action movie. The whole appeal of this film [was] seeing high schoolers remaking a movie, and action set pieces [gave] us the creative [freedom we were looking for],” Senior and film society officer Ignacio Toro said.
Once the movie was decided on, scenes were divided to be filmed and directed by assorted society members. These directors took full advantage of the aforementioned creative freedom, creating the final product through regular puppets, sock puppets, claymation, police case file readings, dating sim playthroughs, green screen edits, isometric RPGs, minecraft, dramatised religious text reading, podcast, animation, and much more.
“I directed three of the scenes,” Lang said. “I modeled one of them after a short film I love called La Jetee, it’s only told through [black and white] photographs. I wanted to add my own creative spin to my scenes.”
The wide array of mediums led to numerous delays and setbacks.
“One difficulty was scheduling. It was summer, so we were more free than during the school year, but everyone was [doing] their own things, [making coordination tricky],” Toro said. “[Beyond that] some people weren’t getting there scenes in on time. We set a deadline and not everyone hit it, which was stressful.”
Things only got harder when attempting to book a date for a big screen viewing in the auditorium.
“Originally we wanted to try [a big screen viewing] during the summer, but unfortunately that didn’t work. Reserving the auditorium and filling out all the paperwork was way more expensive than it needed to be, so we decided we wanted to do it as early as we could during the school year. Then there was the theater show taking up the auditorium and the football games after school, [so we couldn’t interfere with that]” Lang said.
Despite the delays and setbacks the final screening was met with positive feedback from among the film society staff.
“I’m so happy with it. When we first thought of the idea it was more of a pipe dream, and with [the difficulties] getting started finally getting to see it in the auditorium was magical.” Toro said.
