Skye Wallin ’11 returned to Denison this past April to meet with students and discuss one of his latest projects - “The Adventures of Sam Wolf.”
Wallin participated in an alumnus Q&A with students, faculty, and friends to discuss the making of “The Adventures of Sam Wolf.” The film is Wallin’s fourth short film exploring the Sam Wolf narrative – a story about a boy, Sam Wolf, who discovers that he has the extraordinary ability to transport to another dimension and forest world. Wallin explained to the crowd, “The first sketch of Sam Wolf was in my first Cinema Workshop class [at Denison]…I was playing with the imagination and this kid who’s dealing with rejections – and so he goes to this place where he is all powerful.” Wallin directed his first short film about Sam Wolf in 2010 and has made three more since then, playing with different genres and exploring themes of growing up, love, good and evil, nature, and imagination.
He began writing the script for “The Adventures of Sam Wolf” in January 2015. In order to fund the film’s production, Wallin started an Indiegogo campaign and raised $10,000 in two months. “It was really hard,” Wallin explained, “It requires daily engagement. You have to constantly update and you have to be creating content…and you’re spending money from the campaign to keep it going. I learned a lot, for sure.”
Once funded, the film was shot on location in Los Angeles and Humboldt County, California in only seven days. After several months in post-production, the final cut of “The Adventures of Sam Wolf” is a feature film proof-of-concept: a type of short film designed to generate interest and support to fund a feature film version of the story.
Having just finished the script for the feature film about Sam Wolf, Wallin didn’t want to give anything away about Wolf’s next adventures. He only shared, “In the next one I’m going to scale back and play with the subconscious and the imagination, and mental illness as well… it becomes a battle for Sam’s soul and he has to fight for his own soul in his world.”
Wallin is currently submitting “The Adventures of Sam Wolf” to film festivals to generate support for the feature film, and to continue sharing Sam Wolf’s story with the world.
For more on “The Adventures of Sam Wolf,” visit the film’s Facebook page
