“Minor Details,” a kid-friendly high school mystery movie filmed in Utah Valley last summer, screened on Friday night at the LDS Film Festival at Orem’s SCERA Center for the Arts. There will be another public screening, also at the SCERA Center, on Feb 5.

Salt Lake City resident Sally Meyer, a mother of eight, said that kids, especially girls, have limited acting options during their teenage years. And some of what’s available is problematic for young actors who would prefer to avoid roles in films that include profanity, or violence, or sexual content. “As kids in the industry get to be 16 or 17 years old,” Meyer said, “there’s a lot of edgy stuff.”

Meyer’s daughter, 16-year-old Caitlin E.J. Meyer, said she avoids films that conflict with her moral standards. (The Meyers, like most of the other families involved in “Minor Details,” are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) When she looks back at the movies and TV shows she’s been in, Caitlin said, “I don’t want to have any regrets.”

That’s why, about three years ago, Meyer decided to find out whether she could write something for Caitlin herself. Meyer said that she mostly learned by doing: “I’m a poet, and I’ve won a few awards, but I basically just decided to teach myself screenwriting.”

Using a suggestion from Ken Agle of Provo-based Lightstone Studios (which produces the “Liken the Scriptures” series of films), Meyer and a friend, Annie Edwards, who also has a teenage daughter with acting experience, wrote a sequence of scripts for what was initially envisioned as a television series.

Agle liked the scripts, but Lightstone didn’t have the funding to produce them. So Meyer and Edwards took a deep breath and did something that might terrify even the most energetic soccer moms.

“We decided to do it ourselves,” Meyer said.

Not entirely, of course. “Minor Details” was directed, edited and filmed by local do-it-all moviemaker John Lyde, a friend of the Meyers who’d worked with Caitlin on a prior film. (That project, the 2006 DVD-only romantic comedy “Take a Chance,” features Kirby Heyborne and Corbin Allred as redneck Texas brothers who seek true love in Idaho by pretending to be European exchange students.)

Moms, money and battling band camp

Lyde, 32, said that he often gets contacted about ultra-low budget projects because of his versatility. For “Minor Details,” some of the mothers — including Meyer, Edwards and Leah Faber, the mother of another teenage girl in the cast — demonstrated some versatility of their own.

Faber, who lives in Provo, worked directly on arranging financing. She said that making calls and holding meetings was frightening at first, but ended up being a valuable learning experience. “It was not something that I am trained to do,” she said, “but it was something that needed to be done. Everyone had their part.”

For many people involved, doing their part included writing a check. “Minor Details” was produced as cheaply as possible — Meyer said the final cost was well under $250,000 — but the money to make it still had to come from somewhere. Parents, Meyer said, ended up kicking in a little more than a third of the total amount. The rest of the money came from investors.

Faber said that making the decision to dip into the family reserves was more or less like investing in the stock market — you invest as much as you feel like you can afford. One thing that made it easier, she said, was thinking of the money as contributing to her daughter Lauren’s future: “Who better to invest in than our daughter?”

(Lauren, who attends Timpview High School, is one of three siblings — out of eight — still living at home.)

Because he was director, editor and cinematographer, Lyde said he was able to keep costs down by only filming exactly what he needed. “I didn’t have to waste time getting stuff that we might not need,” he said. “I already knew beforehand how I would shoot it and edit it.”

Another boon to the production was being able to film at American Fork Junior High School. Because his father teaches there, Lyde was already on good terms with AFJHS faculty and staff. The production used the school and one private residence almost exclusively, he said, meaning that location fees were minimal.

Although filming at a school has another set of potential problems. “We had a battle,” Lyde said, “shooting around band camp and summer school.”

It’s not easy being mean

One thing that wasn’t a struggle for Lyde was working with his cast. “The actresses were awesome,” he said.

“Minor Details” takes place at an exclusive private school where four girls — Abby (Kelsey Edwards), Paige (Caitlin E.J. Meyer), Claire (Danielle Chuchran) and Taylor (Lauren Faber) — become friends after they (reluctantly at first) join forces to figure out who’s spreading sickness among the school’s cheerleaders.

(Despite its presence at the LDS Film Festival, “Minor Details,” which the filmmakers are attempting to sell as a TV pilot for a national audience, does not have any specifically LDS content.)

“They all had their lines memorized completely,” Lyde said. Even the time that the crew filmed 18 pages of the screenplay in a single day.

For the girls themselves, a lot of their on-screen camaraderie came entirely naturally. Caitlin said that she and the other girls have known each other for years.

Lauren Faber, 14, said that her castmates are some of her best friends. “It was really fun to be with them,” she said.

The kinship among the actresses, actually, made a couple of scenes in the movie a wee bit tricky. Caitlin remembered filming scenes in which Abby and Paige snipe at each other. “It was really hard to be mean,” she said.

For Lauren, the biggest challenge of the production was something she’d never done before, and said she probably won’t ever do again — Taylor is one of the girls on the school’s cheer squad. “I’m definitely not a cheerleader,” Lauren said. “All of the other girls had to help me do it.”

There were also some late hours, on occasion. Lauren said that, one time in particular, the day’s shooting lasted until sometime after midnight. “We had four hours to sleep and then had to get up and be back on the set,” she said. “I ended up taking a nap during lunch.”

What happens next for “Minor Details” remains to be seen. Meyer said that foreign rights have already been sold, and U.S. television networks are considering the movie and its potential as the starting point for a TV series.

For now, just having the movie out there is exhilarating. As Lauren put it, “It’s really nice to be able to show people what we’ve worked so hard for.”

• Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or cclark@heraldextra.com.

If you go

World Premiere Screening of “Minor Details”

When: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 5

Where: SCERA Center for the Arts, 755 S. State St., Orem

Cost: $5 at the door

What: Meet the stars and see the movie. “Minor Details” is about four teenage girls at exclusive Danforth Academy who set aside their differences and work together to figure out who’s making the school’s cheerleaders take sick. The movie was filmed in Utah Valley in 2008 and features numerous local actors.

Familiar Face: One of the stars of the movie is LDS actress Jennette McCurdy. Fans of cable channel Nickelodeon’s “iCarly” will recognize her: McCurdy has appeared in all 32 episodes of “iCarly” that have aired to date as Sam Puckett, the best friend of the series’ main character, Carly Shay. Because of prior commitments, McCurdy will not be at the screening.

On the Web: www.minordetailsthemovie.com