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Ben and Amber Lewis pose for a photo inside the studio at Maple Mountain High School in Spanish Fork on Thursday, May 31, 2012. The two are hosting the Backlot Film Camp from June 18-29. SPENSER HEAPS/Daily Herald

Spenser Heaps

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Ben and Amber Lewis pose for a photo inside the studio at Maple Mountain High School in Spanish Fork on Thursday, May 31, 2012. The two are hosting the Backlot Film Camp from June 18-29. SPENSER HEAPS/Daily Herald

Spenser Heaps

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 Like most of the rest of us, Amber Lewis figured out what she wanted to do with her life when she was 9 years old. Lewis, who’s now 23, and a childhood friend were obsessed with making movies. They had a small video camera and big dreams. “I think it was an Intel Play,” Lewis said. “Not even a real video camera, but it plugged into the computer and had a little editing program.”  

Lewis, a Springville native, went to film school for two years at Brigham Young University, studying screenwriting before switching her major to technology and engineering education. Now, after completing her first year of teaching video production at Maple Mountain High School in Spanish Fork, she’s trying to make a difference for the preteen dreamer she used to be.

Later this month, Lewis will launch her first Backlot Film Camp, a summer program for kids, at Maple Mountain High School. It’s three hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks, with a cost of $150 per camper.

Back in the day, Lewis said, she and her friend wanted to do more but couldn’t: “We were really frustrated because there were no opportunities for us to learn anything or do anything.” Between them, Lewis and her friend agreed that whoever got to Hollywood first would help the other one get there. Then in her first year at BYU, Lewis had an idea for something even better: a summer camp program to help kids learn about filmmaking.

For both Lewis and her husband, Ben Lewis, Backlot Film Camp is a chance to provide something each of them wish they’d had growing up. Both Lewises were official student council videographers at the high schools they attended — they even met attending a student council camp in St. George.

“We were the same person, just going to different schools,” Ben Lewis said. Ben Lewis, 22, started making films at age 11, but said that he’s always wished he had learned to do more than just point a handheld video camera before high school. During his first high school years, he was just learning about basics like lighting and sound production while other kids were already making movies.

Even if you’re Steven Spielberg

Backlot Film Camp is set up to help participants learn a little bit of everything. Each group of five students will complete five projects: a music video, a newscast, a public service announcement, a commercial and a film trailer. Additionally, each project has five specific jobs. By the end of the camp, every participant gets to take a turn doing each of the jobs: lighting, camera, sound, editing and directing.

That helps young filmmakers begin to build an understanding of how things work in all aspects of film production, but also teaches them something even more valuable. “I never made a good movie that I was really proud of until I had people helping me,” Lewis said.

In the beginning, most kids’ understanding of filmmaking is that you tell your actors where to stand and what to say, and then point the camera. And some kids get pretty good just on that level. As Lewis put it, however, the results are even better when you work with other people who care about filmmaking as much as you do.

“As a team, you can do it so much better than you could by yourself,” she said.

It’s a lesson that even the most well-known filmmakers learn. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Steven Spielberg said that he still gets the same thrill from filmmaking that he did when he was 12 years old and using his parents’ 8 mm home movie camera. Now, however, there’s even more excitement than before.

“The thrill hasn’t changed at all,” Spielberg said. “In fact, as I’ve gotten older, it’s actually increased, because now I appreciate the collaboration. When I was a kid, there was no collaboration. It’s you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with.”

Camp participants also will learn that filmmaking is hard work. There’s a bit of boot camp in Backlot Film Camp: All five projects are completed during the two-week camp period, with campers working from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday through Friday.

Fun and fundamentals

At first, Lewis didn’t know where she could hold the camp, and looked at a couple of warehouse locations in Utah Valley. The solution ended up being right under her nose. The camp will be held at Maple Mountain High School and, in return, it will raise funds for the school’s broadcasting program.

The camp will have a split emphasis on teacher-student instruction and the kind of thing that teaches most kids about filmmaking: actually doing it. “It’s about 40 percent instruction and 60 percent doing,” Lewis said. “It’s important to have instruction beforehand and assessment afterwards, but that’s kind of how filmmaking is: You learn as you’re doing it.”

Ryan Johnson, a Maple Mountain student who’s planning to participate in the camp, said that what he loves most about filmmaking is the creative outlet it provides. “It’s a way of expressing things that I can’t express with words,” he said.

Johnson, 17, has been making films since the fifth grade and plans to go to film school after graduating from Maple Mountain next year. He shares his cinematic creations on YouTube, but hopes to one day share them in movie theaters. “Right now I’m just trying to see what I can make,” Johnson said. “I really want to make action movies.” (His hero, incidentally, is a guy by the name of Spielberg.)

All of the Backlot campers probably have something similar in mind, but you don’t have to go to Los Angeles to turn your filmmaking skills into your occupation. Ben Lewis is studying marketing at Utah Valley University, but also has a day job at Springville-based Rustica Hardware. He applied for a sales job, but when the people at Rustica saw on his resume that he had film production experience, they hired him to do video advertising instead.

Ben Lewis said he hopes that the Backlot campers also just have a good time: “I hope it’s 90 percent fun and 10 percent fundamentals.” And having the proper skills, he said, just increases the enjoyment. “The best part is when you see the final product and it looks like something you’ve seen before in a theater, instead of something you made with your friends.”

When: June 18-29; camp sessions are 9 a.m. to noon, Monday through Friday

Where: Maple Mountain High School, 51 N. 2550 East, Spanish Fork

Cost: $150

Info: backlotfilmcamp.com