THE SCRIPT
Christopher Zydowicz, screenwriter, wrote from his imagination and his experiences as a teacher. “When I came up with the concept, I had come back from teaching elementary school for three years…I like to think stories out a lot. I can hear the characters. I can hold conversations with the characters. Putting it all together just seemed natural.”
CAST
“We al
ways try to give our projects a classical approach,” Tim Rogers, the director, said. “We didn’t worry too much about trying to meet every politically correct criteria when casting. We tried to back away from the extremes of that and make it just a bunch of kids.”
“I don’t think we could have picked a better cast,” Christopher said. “They were perfect for the roles. God [had] prepared them specifically personality-wise for those roles. When I wrote it, I thought of students I had in the past. I set up the kids in my story and their personalities according to them and named these kids for my students. And the characters that we picked to play these kids fit perfectly.”
PRODUCTION
“Filming these children’s videos (The Treasure Map and Project Dinosaur) was an unusual experience, because we [had] never worked with a cast this young before,” said Wade Ramsey, director of photography. “It changed a lot of the way we had to work, and it made us learn to be more flexible.”
“Using a children’s cast [was] a good experience, and [we] had terrific kids,” Laura Stevenson, the editor, said. The crew had to take into account the children’s attention spans, their schooling and their families’ schedules. They tried not to take the kids out of school too much, but that severely limited the hours they had to film. “I don’t think that we were totally prepared for how long it would take to work with the children, so scheduling was a problem. We had to work very short days.”
“The limited hours made it more challenging to maintain a consistency of look within the scenes,” Wade said. “We couldn’t always shoot a whole scene at one time as we would like to have done, which made it much more difficult to get the shots to look as though they were done all at one time instead of over a period of time.”