Central Mountain grad Bumbarger sets movie premier for late April
STATE COLLEGE, PA – The last time Record readers had the chance to see the name Wyatt Bumbarger in print, he was a senior shooting guard for the District 6 champion Central Mountain basketball team in 2017. Five years later the Hunter Run native is back in the local public eye, about to premier his very own full-length horror film at State College’s State Theatre on April 28.
Today Bumbarger is a fifth-year senior at Penn State double-majoring in Film Production & Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship. His full-length 2-hour horror film, A Deer in the Woods, for which he served as writer, director, and co-producer, is a self-described “passion project that I wanted to complete before graduating college. My goal was to create a learning environment for myself and my creative collaborators, allowing us to create a story that we are passionate about so that we could make a name for ourselves as filmmakers and actors.”
Bumbarger grew up in the far reaches of the Keystone Central School District “up” Hunter Run in the Centre County portion of the far-flung district. Which led to the obvious question, how do you get from Hunter Run to movie writer, director, co-producer, to which he responded: “To answer your question, how I got from growing up in a small Central PA town to directing my own horror film, I don’t entirely know. Looking back at it, it seems very unlikely. I started off solely as a business major at Penn State and never even picked up a film camera until late into my sophomore year. Initially, I was very unhappy with my business studies but found a passion for creative writing in my freshman English class. I had already been obsessed with movies and so I figured film was the perfect avenue to combine my passion for writing and pop culture. After I took my first intro to film class my sophomore year, I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. “
He said the project has been worked on outside of class for his team of (almost) entirely Penn State students. “We have spent thousands of hours working on the project from the pre-production stage (writing the script, casting), production stage (filming), and post-production (editing, sound design, and music composition).” He said the film will be released under his production company, Hunter Run Road Productions. He said he actually launched the company in one of his entrepreneurship classes where class members were given a small scholarship to launch their own business.
Bumbarger said his biggest inspirations in film are the auteur filmmakers, people who write and direct their own work and leave a distinct emotional imprint of who they are as people into their stories. “A lot of the people who have inspired me had already completed full-length films at a very early age and so I made it a goal of mine to do the same. Initially, I had a separate idea for a film to produce, but right before filming was about to commence, the entire project had to be scrapped due to COVID ruining our filming locations. I didn’t want to give up though, so I promised my team I would provide a new full-length script in two weeks so that we could stay on schedule and continue the goal.”
But it was not an easy self-imposed assignment: “ I actually ended up finishing the new 137-page script in just six days after locking myself in a room for a week and writing every night from 9 p. m. to 2 a.m. With COVID, I knew that public locations would be difficult, and I have always had a sweet spot for horror films, so I decided to write A Deer in the Woods as a horror film that could take place in one location – the log cabin in the woods that I grew up in.”
For those seeking more information on the project, you can look at the project’s initial crowd-funding page which includes a teaser trailer, synopsis of the film, and a list of cast and crew here:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-deer-in-the-woods-feature-film/x/26889776#/. The Bumbarger team also has a social media, @aditwfilm on Instagram and Facebook.
The full-length film will be having its world premiere at The State Theatre in State College, PA on Thursday, April 28th at 7pm. Tickets can be purchased here: https://thestatetheatre.org/events/a-deer-in-the-woods/?occurrence=2022-04-28.
