Lights, Camera, Clown Shoes!

Zac Vujnov had a great idea for his final film project at COM: a buddy treasure hunt starring a college student and an elderly man. The script got Vujnov (’21) accepted into Production III, an undergraduate honors thesis class where he and a team of classmates would produce the film. Then BU began announcing COVID protocols.

All actors would have to come from within the University community? Scratch the elderly lead.

Fortunately, Vujnov had another idea: a faux documentary chronicling a young bowler’s chase of his father’s records.

No go: actors would need to be masked.

A psychological comedy-thriller about a woman stuck in a bee suit?

Nope. Sets would be restricted to groups of 10 or fewer people, with no more than two actors performing—and the pivotal scene involved a large crowd.

“Before COVID, everyone had all of these crazy, beautiful ideas,” Vujnov says. But public health restrictions threatened those artistic visions. “I wasn’t going to put everyone in surgical masks. I hated the look of that.”

He had to think of something soon—he was running out of time.

Student filmmakers have always grappled with low budgets, crowded academic calendars and inexperience. The pandemic made the process nearly impossible. Still, Vujnov wanted to write a script that wouldn’t require compromise. He settled on an idea: a rom-com starring two (almost) silent clowns.

Roses & Red Noses tells the story of Colin and Carol, who perform for tips in Boston’s Public Garden. The film is goofy, touching and a little mysterious. There’s even a chase scene. And thanks to the filmmakers’ deft storytelling and ability to surmount whatever challenges the pandemic threw at them, the film cleaned up at the 2022 Redstone Film Festival.

You’d be surprised how difficult it was to find a female clown mask that wasn’t incredibly creepy.

—Nicole Barradas

MASKING UP

Production III is typically offered in the fall. Student filmmakers have the semester to produce a rough cut for class credit, but final editing and sound mixing can spill into the spring. Because of the pandemic, though, the department postponed its 2020 section to spring 2021, which left no margin for error. The script for Roses & Red Noses was approved just before the start of the semester by Paul Schneider, chair of the film and television department and instructor for Production III. Vujnov and his crew had less than four months to cast, rehearse, shoot and edit.

Producer Nicole Barradas (’21) immediately dissected the script, breaking scenes, equipment and props into a series of spreadsheets to estimate costs and draft schedules. Schneider holds weekly production meetings for each project. One of his most valuable roles, he says, is helping students understand what’s feasible given their resources. “There are so many logistical challenges,” he says. “Filmmaking is a little bit like fighting a war: if you don’t have any gasoline for the tanks, it doesn’t matter how good the tank is—it won’t run.”

One way he’s able to help is with Student Film Fund grants. Each Production III project receives money from the fund, a pool of gifts from dozens of donors, which provides student filmmakers with a level of stability. “If you never know from year to year whether you’re going to have any funding, it makes it very difficult to plan.”

In 2021, Production III projects received about $500 each. The Roses & Red Noses crew took to social media to raise an additional $2,000. They hit their target just as production began. The film’s closing credits thank 42 donors.

Student filmmakers benefit from COM resources in other ways, borrowing cameras, lenses, lights and dollies, for instance. Of course, each script has its own needs and faces unexpected costs. For Roses & Red Noses, one expense was obvious from the title: clown costumes.

“You’d be surprised how difficult it was to find a female clown mask that wasn’t incredibly creepy,” Barradas says.

The masks also had to be comfortable enough for the actors to wear for long periods of time. And once Colin, played by Fady Demian (CAS’22, CFA’23), began running around downtown Boston, his clown shoes fell apart. “They had huge holes in them,” Barradas says. “We ran through three or four pairs.” More than a year after production began, Amazon’s algorithm continues to recommend clown-related products to Barradas.

The biggest expenses? U-Haul truck rentals followed by food for the cast and crew. To get around the lack of public bathrooms near their Public Garden location shoots, Barradas needed a stack of petty cash so anyone in need of a break could go to a nearby coffee shop.

We would cut in our separate rooms for eight hours straight… Hard drives were flying all over the place.

—Zac Vujnov

BODY LANGUAGE

Roses & Red Noses includes just five spoken lines. Despite the silence, there’s no mistaking the sad state of Colin’s life when we meet him at the start of the film. He moves lethargically through a grimy apartment. We can see he’s unhappy despite the red grin painted on his mask. His evolution is communicated almost entirely through motion.

To prepare, the actors worked with Yo-EL Cassell, an assistant professor of movement at BU’s College of Fine Arts. He helped them build expressive movements into their performances. “When we move, we reveal,” Cassell says. Over the course of the 14-minute film, Colin’s movements evolve from morose to joyous—and reveal the transformation at the heart of Vujnov’s story.

Once the crew wrapped its last shoot, they scrambled to complete a rough cut of the film to get the class credits they needed to graduate. “We went from an empty project file to a final cut with titles and graphics in three weeks,” Vujnov says. Conveniently, he was roommates with his editor, Sam Broach (’21). “We would cut in our separate rooms for eight hours straight—I would be mixing all the sounds and making the music and he’d be doing color. Hard drives were flying all over the place.”

DELAYED GRATIFICATION

Roses & Red Noses was an unusual film made during an unusual year. “I like to make a lot of crime stuff. I love gritty, dark characters. I like bad people,” Vujnov says. The lighthearted Roses represented none of the above. And yet, he and the cast and crew pulled it off in record time, growing closer as they cleared each hurdle in the production. “Once all of my original script ideas got thrown to the wayside, this stopped being about me. It’s not my film, it’s our film—these people will be with me for the rest of my life because of this project.”

They finished the film in time for graduation, but too late to enter it in the 2021 Redstone Film Festival. The wait was worth it. Vujnov and Barradas, who had since moved to Los Angeles, watched the 2022 awards ceremony online as their film won again and again. Vujnov received the award for best sound design, director of photography Jen Cuciti (’21) received best cinematographer, Broach tied for best editing honors—and Roses & Red Noses was named best film.

“It’s incredibly hard to make a good film,” Schneider says. “When something turns out well, you know it means all the stars were aligned.”