“Think of the greatest movie you’ve ever seen and that’s the plot,” senior Mateo Selvera said of “everyone shall sit on a little donkey.”

“everyone shall sit on a little donkey” was written, produced, filmed, and edited by LASA Audio Video Production (AVP) students. The film was entered into the University Interscholastic League (UIL) film category, where it passed the first round of judging but not the second. Senior Andres Hernandez was the film’s main screenwriter. He wrote the script for a separate assignment. 

One aspect of AVP is table reads, where a group of students read a script to give feedback. According to Selvera, who was part of the team that made the film, the rest of the team thought the script had promise.

“We read his [script] and everyone thought it was funny,” Selvera said. “It was so funny that we thought we should make it into an actual film.”

The script underwent editing before filming as part of pre-production. According to junior and editor of the film Asa Shepard, location scouting ended up being tricky.

“We did like two location scouting trips,” Shepard said. “The first one went pretty okay, we didn’t find our actual location, but we found one that looks promising. But then on a second one, we went to a park where we actually saw the scenery and we thought it was nicer since there were not many people there then. It was called Decker Lake.”

Junior Gavin Ratcliff was in charge of lighting for the film. According to him, part of location scouting involved making sure the location had the right atmosphere for the film.

“We decided we wanted to be more mysterious and separate from everything,” Ratcliff said. “I’d say we really took advantage of that location and got a lot of the ambience and our expectations expressed a lot of our vision.”

Once actual filming was finished, the crew moved on to post-production editing. The film was passed around a bit before it became what it is today, according to Hernandez.

“What you got to understand is when we made this movie, it sucked,” Hernandez said. “When we edited it together, it sucked. When me and Ian edited it, it sucked, then we gave everything to Asa, and he made it work.”

The plot of the movie itself is, as AVP teacher Vanessa Mokry said, appealing to some and confusing to others. According to Hernandez, it mainly follows two guys. 

“There are two dudes: Broken Bottle, and Wooden Stick,” Hernandez said. “They are in a car. Broken Bottle gives Wooden Stick a gun. They exit the car. A girl is in the back of the car. Wooden Stick then goes back into the car and then he dies. A girl then gets out of the car and Broken Bottle, he dies. Girl walks away. That’s the end of the movie. Somehow they thought it was a great movie.”

Although the film passed the first round of UIL judging, it did not pass the second. According to Selvera, the second judges did not fully understand the movie

“So basically, the whole thing was a joke,” Selvera said. “Like a big joke. And then we submitted it to UIL, and people fell for the joke. We thought it was funny, we submitted some dumb stuff. And then the judges were like, ‘This is perfect!’ And then the next round came around and they did not like it.”