Last spring, a short film entitled “Murder Go Round” won Best Picture at the St. Lawrence Film Festival. It had a budget of $40 and featured five main characters, who are all murdered. They are duct-taped to a merry go round, and it is up to the audience to deduce who the murderer is. Now, it is being made into a full-length movie, with a cast and crew of students.
It all started with an idea that Austen Sprake, a senior at St. Lawrence and film major, had of five bodies duct-taped to a merry go round. Conversing with his roommate and girlfriend bouncing around ideas, the title “Murder Go Round” was created, and everything else was based on that idea.
Though the feature film is based on the short film made last year, Sprake says they are “changing the story dramatically,” altering the types of characters. In the short, “the characters were essentially stereotypical genre characters that people will recognize,” Sprake says. In the feature film, the film will contain “very strange unique characters,” that are less stereotypical and represent different genres instead.
The general premise will be the same. Five characters are murdered, and over the course of the film, the audience will be taken into each character’s memory and hear their story. Characters will show up in each other’s memories, and certain stories won’t add up. By the end of the film, the audience should be able to tell who isn’t telling the truth.
Sprake is trying to make this film unique, and not succumb to the clichés that crop up in the murder mystery genre. He wants an “interactive murder mystery” with a “strange, quirky premise.” In this film, there is no detective character, and the film will be “playing around with different character types.” Sprake says that the film will be a Coen-Brothers-style film that will be aware of stereotypes and play off of them.
In terms of his directorial mission, Sprake says that he is giving a good deal of creative range to the writers and actors. He says that he is giving guidelines and an idea of what he would like to see, but the writers can “create their own scenes” and what they do is “down to their vision.” Actors and writers can construct their characters together. When asked if there will be any improvising, Sprake responded that it will be done through actions and not words.
Noa Graham, one of the screenwriters for the film, says that his creative process is to “sit down and talk to myself. I always question the motive of my character and I’m not afraid to delete paragraphs if I feel that I’ve formed a tunnel vision over a particular sequence. It’s always nice to start fresh, but with what you liked about the last attempt in mind.” When asked about the short film last year, he gave the following response: “I thought it was a funny short, bringing stereotypes into the forefront of characterization is an interesting way to approach a mystery, because everyone has their biases and will call out the murderer based on those.” Also, he was “especially surprised when [Sprake’s] character was wearing a pair of sunglasses that [he] had lost last semester…wondering where those went. Glad it was somewhere good.”
As far as challenges go, Sprake says the biggest is money. “We aren’t a filmmaking campus,” he says, and it can be tough to find resources, so sometimes they may have to improvise. Graham’s biggest challenge as a writer is, “drawing from familiar source material, but having to put my spin on it. It’s easy to be original, but it’s at risk of losing the spirit of your character if you don’t acknowledge the history and culture that has created their archetype.”
For the future of film at St. Lawrence, Sprake is optimistic. Last year was the first film festival in a few years due to lack of interest and no one to run it. He hopes that this film will entice students interested in film to come to St. Lawrence, and eventually make Film Studies a major (it is currently a minor, but Sprake created his own film major.) He is grateful to the university for this opportunity, and hopes that students enjoy this film.
If you would like to contribute to the film, you can donate to their IndieGoGo fundraising page, the link to which can be found on the Facebook page for the film: Murder Go Round- The Movie. Cast and crew members are also still being sought, especially male actors. If you are interested, you can email Sprake, the director, at ajspra14@stlawu.edu. The film will most likely be released at the end of next semester.