Thanks to two local teenagers, a robber posing as Santa was caught red-handed!

Here’s an early Christmas present for Ocracoke Current readers:

First, go to this link and watch Christmas Crimes, an 18-minute original film written, directed, and edited by Ocracoke School junior Kevin Perez. After you watch it, come back to the Current for our exclusive behind-the-scenes interview with the movie’s creator.

Christmas Crimes debuted at the annual Ocracoke School Christmas program, which was December 18th this year. The next day, Kevin met with me to talk about the making of this new holiday classic.

“I’ve been looking forward to [filming another Christmas movie] since last year,” he said. (Another treat for you, dear reader: watch last year’s film, “Broken Bridge.”) 

In spite of his eagerness and plenty of warning that the holidays were hurtling toward us, Christmas Crimes was written in one night and filmed in five.

“Originally, I had a different plan, but it was going to be too long and too hard to film,” he said. “I had to re-work it and make it shorter. So I wrote this in one night and started filming on the 13th.”

The first, abandoned script idea was going to include a lot of references to other movies. Christmas Crimes contains just one, “an homage to “The Shining” with the robber’s face.”

Shot on location around the village, Christmas Crimes has a cast of six humans – five teenage boys and one female octogenarian – and one ferocious canine. They filmed in the school gym, on the village streets riding around in a golf cart, and inside island homes. 

Waylon Underwood and Carson O’Neal star in the film as young brothers eagerly awaiting Christmas morn. Hunter Collins narrates, Brandon O’Neal plays the real Santa, and Kevin himself plays the imposter Claus. Mackey Bell plays herself.

The kids filmed every night for five days (in addition to school work, basketball practice, and rehearsing for the Nutcracker performance at the school Christmas show, which is a whole ’nother story). That comes to a total of ten hours filming with the actors, light crew and script prompters Katie O’Neal and Sydney Austin, cameraman Liam Caswell, and keygrip Dalton Kalna, who rode around on top of the golf cart, holding the camera or lights. Kevin estimates that he spent another 24 hours in planning, writing, finding music, editing (that job was a 6-hour all-nighter marathon that ended at 4am the day the film debuted), and even more time adding bloopers and credits before uploading it to YouTube.

He also created several pieces of the equipment he needed.

“My camera doesn’t shoot well in low light,” he said. “So I made a camera stabilizer with PVC pipe.”

For the dark scenes, Kevin built a makeshift keylight with a dish drainer, metal plates, tin foil, and six LED lights. He attached it to a boom pole to shine light on the windshield of the golf cart.

“An eighteen-minute movie was a lot of work,” he said. Kevin says that he appreciates other filmmakers’ efforts because he knows what goes into the minutes on the screen.

“I try not to be critical of movies,” he said. “Even the crappiest movie you can think of, somebody had to work really hard on it – that’s somebody’s blood, sweat, and tears.”

Like many artists, Kevin is critical of his own work.

“We had problems with continuity,” he said. “If I’d had more time, I would’ve re-shot some scenes.”

An example is the limping robber. They filmed the limping scene before deleting the scene where the boys kick the robber Santa. I told Kevin I just assumed the robber Santa had a bum leg and always limped like that! Also, his limp made it more believable that he couldn’t catch up with the boys. 

The genuine Santa (with a genuine elf-made coat) never shows his face. Is it because the boys, as Timothy (Carson O’Neal) says, aren’t supposed to see Santa? No, it’s because the Santa suit doesn’t include a beard. “We had to be mysterious with Santa,” Kevin said.

Kevin filmed a final scene with the narrator Hunter Collins, which wrapped up the story. They shot it the last night of filming, and Kevin realized too late that the mic was off. Oops!

He also realized that the clock timer was wrong, and to make it right he had to do some quick filming outside his house at 1am during his all-nighter.

Kevin also had (unnecessary) concerns about whether his audience would enjoy “Christmas Crimes.”

“I was worried about the gym scene,” he said. “I wanted it to be funny, not too serious. I was nervous we were trying too hard.”

After the screening, “I heard good things about it,” he said, clearly happy that Ocracoke School students, staff, and community members laughed and cheered. 

I asked him about the Christmas Crimes soundtrack, which I thought was brilliant. He used “Christmas Kisses” by Marty Robbins, which he found on an old vinyl record. He knew he wanted to incorporate it and “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys into his movie. The eerie music in the chase scene is from the soundtrack of the movie “Only God Forgives.” During the dog scene, with Poochie (owned by Ocracoke School student Juan Morales), Kevin used the song “Conquest” by the White Stripes. Kevin made it clear that he doesn’t have the rights to any of the music.

As for Kevin’s future plans…. he thinks that filmmaking will remain a hobby, but isn’t considering it as a career move. 

“You can work really hard, and just not be lucky, and not make it,” he said. He’ll go to college and choose a major with a better success rate.

“I’d rather make movies on my own, for fun,” he said. “I’m having fun doing it right now.”

In the meantime, he has other short films planned – one for a Shakespeare class, one in the spring, and, of course, one for next year’s Christmas show.