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Click on, type in or astrally project yourself to the following link: www.vimeo.com/lensflare.
There you will find a trailer for a film called “Nero Bloom: Private Eye.”
It has the look and tone of a detective movie from the 1940s but was in fact made by two talented and enterprising student filmmakers from Huntington University, Jason Eberly and Nathan Hartman.
And unlike most senior film projects, “Nero Bloom: Private Eye” will get a big-screen debut.
It opens Saturday at Cinema Center, 437 E. Berry St., and is scheduled to play there for a week.
If business is brisk, its run will be extended.
You can find showtimes and other information at NeroBloom.com. You can also call 426-3456.
I haven’t viewed the entire film, but what I have seen impresses me mightily.
Making a film noir that looks like film noir did in its heyday is not an easy task.
There’s a monochromatic sumptuousness to those hardboiled films that is hard to duplicate because filmmaking equipment has gotten too good.
Eberly says they were able to find an equivalent to this richness in a new technology that allows filmmakers to combine digital cameras with 35 mm lenses.
To this cuddly gadgetry, Eberly and friends added such period locales as a historic Huntington hotel, the Bass Mansion on the campus of University of Saint Francis, a train platform (complete with working steam locomotive) in Coldwater, Mich., and the entire town of Zionsville.
Yes, the production managed to convince the Zionsville City Council to close down the town’s historic Main Street so the filmmakers could shoot a convincing cityscape.
“They were going to charge us $500 to $1,000, but they ended up letting us do it for free,” Eberly says.
Fifteen antique-car owners, including those from Kentucky and Illinois, agreed to make the trip on their own dime just so they could provide automotive authenticity to the Zionsville shoot.
That was a theme of the production: people who charged little or charged nothing for invaluable backdrops and resources. Eberly estimates that he and his crew spent $4,000 or $5,000 on a production that could have easily cost $200,000.
“Nero Bloom: Private Eye” will be paired with another nostalgic short created by Eberly and called “After Hours.”
It is an homage to Gene Kelly musicals that stars and was choreographed by Evan Kasprzak of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance.”
This week’s Web exclusive is my review of the new “Star Trek” film. It will be posted Friday on The Journal Gazette’s arts and entertainment blog, “Get a Load of This,” at www.journalgazette.net/getaload.
