Making a movie is hard enough in a controlled environment. Making one in armageddon-inspired chaos? That’s another story.
That’s exactly what filmmakers Charlotte Geissler and Kiki Griffin aimed to do with “Carter and the End,” a fictional story that takes place within the boundaries of a real-world event. The film was shot at Swampfest, a Florida festival that celebrates the world of BMX and skateboarding. During the film, Carter Bass, the film’s lead actor, interacts with real festival-goers in character, treating the festival as an “end-of-the-world” celebration.
Geissler, who is originally from Germany, linked up with her now creative partner Griffin while working in Berlin. When the two found themselves living in Atlanta at the same time, they started making movies together. Bass and Griffin have known each other longer, having grown up together in Athens. Bass has long been interested in skateboarding – he’s in the process of building a skatepark in his own backyard, according to Griffin – and his love for the activity is what initially caused the women to think about filming a movie down at Swampfest.
“If you look [Swampfest] up, there are just the most insane videos of people running through rings of fire, running down giant monster trucks,” Griffin said. “That immediately captivated us to go down there.”
Heading into the chaos of Swampfest, Geissler and Griffin struggled with how to tackle the film. According to the filmmakers, they knew that a separate documentary crew would also be at the festival, so they didn’t want to take a straight nonfiction approach. On the other hand, they thought doing something fully scripted would be too difficult. The decision to blend documentary and fiction came to them as a way to make things a little easier on themselves and to make the film unique.
“We got together and wrote a script for it that had some lines that the main actor, Carter Bass, was supposed to follow,” Geissler said. “But a lot of it was like, this is what he should say, or [something] around these lines, you know? It was a complete experiment going down there and seeing how it would work.”
Bass had never acted in a movie before, so the improvisational approach allowed him to more naturally fit into his role. That, in turn, made everything feel a little more real. During one scene, which involves a dream sequence where Bass’ character imagines himself getting married, festival goers thought that an actual Swampfest-style wedding was about to unfold. According to Geissler, some crew members from the other documentary film that was on the scene even came over to figure out what was going on.
“It created this really special atmosphere where the real people around us that we were filming thought that what we were filming was real,” Geissler said. “That really came together in this wedding scene.”
But while chaos can conjure some good surprises, it also comes with challenges. For the crew of “Carter and the End,” that primary challenge was variability – and making sure that everyone came out alive.
“We are coming into a scenario where we are completely unsure of what’s happening,” Griffin said. “You know, within the first 30 minutes, our main subject [was] knocked out cold in the skate bowl, and had to be lifted out on a gurney.”
You read that right. On day one of the shoot, some of the crew members walked over to a nearby gas station to stock up on supplies. When they came back, Bass was on a gurney, swarmed by medics. According to Griffin, he skated into the bowl at the exact same time as a BMX rider, and the two collided at the bottom of the curved basin. The BMX rider’s helmet hit Bass in the face, causing him to black out.
Bass ended up being fine, but it was a scary way to start out the weekend.
“If there’s anybody that can keep going, it’s Carter Bass,” Griffin said.
Griffin served as the cinematographer for “Carter and the End,” and shot the film on her personal Sony FX6 camera. She called the FX6 a perfect “run and gun” camera – lightweight, good for shooting at night, and easy to work with even when you’re on your feet all day.
“It’s also a tank,” Griffin said. “I trust it to be able to go into the middle of a mosh pit and take a swing or two and come out just fine.”
The filmmaking team is in the post-production stages, and hopes to have a final cut ready by this summer. Griffin and Geissler also want to include other multimedia elements in the film, such as camcorder footage and photographs taken by Fabian Ceron. The filmmakers have also thought about trying to incorporate stop motion or some type of animation to help beef up anything they might not have been able to capture during the three-day shoot.
Griffin said she also hopes to get usable footage from some of the attendees she met while down at the festival. Many festival-goers were getting up-close footage of different stake tricks and falls, which Griffin hopes would add to the collaborative spirit of the film.
“I think that the collaborative effort is really beautiful because it’s such a compact event where there’s so much happening at the same time,” she said. “Hopefully having these other people that wanted to team up with us is going to be able to help push the visual forward.”
