Local's 'Looking Up Dresses' to premiere today

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Next time your significant other invites you to church, maybe it’s just a convenient way for them to announce sometime between the opening prayer and first hymn their intentions to see other people.
If it sounds comical, it is. But that’s just the predicament Jade Williams faces when his lady, Wendy Jones breaks up with him only a couple of pews back from the priest in the short film, “Looking Up Dresses,” which was directed by Santa Barbara City College instructor Jared Ingram and will make its world premiere at 4 p.m. today at the Marjorie Luke Theatre.


The film is one of several dozen entered in the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s shorts programs.
While being cut loose in church is tough to swallow, its likely that an even tougher reality is getting dumped for being too good of a guy, or as Jones puts it to Williams in the film, “You’re the type of guy you marry, not the kind you want to date.”
So in less than 12 minutes, Williams, who is played by Sam Huntington, has to convince Jones, played by Jlynn Johnson, that he’s not as pure as she thinks.
In order to do this, Williams transforms from an innocent church boy to a smooth talking rebel, who after telling Jones what he really thinks about while the priest preaches about sin, has his girl pretty much begging to come back.
One of the things Williams confesses to Jones with a particular amount of pride is that when he was 5 years old, he crawled beneath the pews and looked up women’s dresses, which happens to be an autobiographical plug for Ingram.
“One of my absolutely earliest memories of my childhood is crawling under the pews in church and looking up women’s dresses,” Ingram said.
Ingram, who is now 30 and has had two other films appear in the Film Festival, said he used the help of about 40 Santa Barbara High School students, among others, to make the film.
For the past five years, Ingram has taught young people about making films through the Multimedia Arts and Design Academy at Santa Barbara High School. The students who take the class receive college credit, and in this case, got to participate in the process of making an actual short film.
Ingram said there is not better way to learn the filmmaking process than doing it.
“It was a very, very natural step for me to include students on it,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity to use the set as a classroom that these students can really learn from.”
Aside from helping out on the set of “Looking Up Dresses,” which was shot over a three-day perioed last May at the First United Methodist Church at the corner of Anapamu and Garden Streets, Ingram said his students complete a handful of film projects during any given semester that include making a music video, a public service announcement and a short film.
And from the past results of the Film Festival’s 10-10-10 competition, which is limited to young filmmakers and screenplay writers, Ingram’s students are learning plenty. He said one of his students has won the competition each of the past three years and several current students are involved in this year’s competition.
One of those students is Freddy Meyer, who was the boom operator on the set of “Looking Up Dresses.”
Meyer said being on the set of a real film was a good experience and he’s excited to see the finished product with a crowd.
“In general, it was a really cool experience to be on a real film set and to get to see Jared in action,” he said. “It was cool to have that combination.”
Ingram said “Looking Up Dresses” is one scene from a feature length script he wrote last summer, which he hopes to eventually receive funding to complete.
“The goal is to use the short film to get the feature made,” he said. “The hope is the short opens up some doors and shows people what we can do.”
Aside from the students’ help, Ingram said he received a grant from Kodak, which donated 35 mm film that was left over from the Clint Eastwood film, “Flags of Our Fathers.”
Panavision then gave Ingram a good deal on a camera as part of its New Filmmakers Program.
Pile on some local help from the Coffee Cat, Sojourner Café and Debbie’s Delights and you have a film ingrained with local support that’s hopefully headed for the big screen at feature length.
“Honestly, I think movies are sort of a miracle,” he said. “They say it takes a village to raise a baby, but it’s same for film.”
“Looking Up Dresses” will be shown a second time at 7 p.m. this Friday. This screening is also at Marjorie Luke Theatre.