Lights, camera, action!

BY: Lori Tepinski
Posted 1/4/17

Rochelle Township High School graduate Coleman Ranahan releases film "Lost Signals."

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Lights, camera, action!

Posted

It was lights, camera, and action for Rochelle Township High School alumni Coleman Ranahan marking the release of his first-ever feature film, “Lost Signals.”
Ranahan, a 2007 graduate of RTHS, wrote, directed and produced the movie shot on location in Lindenwood, Malta and Chicago as well as on the road during a trip to Los Angeles. Ranahan attended Columbia College in Chicago, graduating in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in screenwriting.
“The movie is about an up and coming filmmaker who tells his two best friends that he is moving from Chicago to Los Angeles on only two days notice and must deal with the fallout that comes after,” Ranahan explained.
Ranahan became inspired during a New Year’s party but it wasn’t until his final year at Columbia College that things kicked into gear for the filmmaker. Many would-be film graduates, Ranahan said, have their minds set to eventually move to California.
“You would keep hearing questions in the hallways of whether or not someone was going to move to Los Angeles or whether or not they were just going to move back home or even stay in Chicago,” Ranahan said. “And those questions started getting asked of me. At some point those all blended together and then a lightbulb went off in my head.”
All told, the process to make the movie took about two and a half years, with another three months of editing. Along with Ranahan, the movie features actors Kent Nusbaum and Devon Nimerfroh, Ranahan’s best friends.

“The film was completed and ready in late 2015 and then I spent about nine months trying to get it into film festivals. We released the film online officially on Friday, Dec. 16, 2016,” Ranahan said. “Just one day shy of the four year anniversary of when we had first started filming the movie.”

Working on film sets for over two years before starting his own movie helped Ranahan realize what is involved in the pre-production process. The props and actions, Ranahan said, were kept to a minimum.
“We kept the film limited to three major locations, one per act, and mostly kept the film about the characters themselves,” Ranahan said. “We would rehearse each scene for about an hour or two while lighting and camera would be set up, and then go in and do about two to three takes per camera setup.”
Ranahan said there were five days of shooting between the Lindenwood and Malta locations and five days in Chicago around the New Year in 2013. The travel shots were done while Ranahan moved from the Chicago area to Los Angeles in March of 2013.
Ranahan said since he didn’t have much of a budget and it was his first feature director credit, the entire process took awhile. Post-production expenses, along with sound for the film delayed things further but Ranahan wasn’t deterred.
“Overall I was OK with having to wait or do a few of these things in order to make the film better and to have that pay off hopefully for the next time around,” Ranahan said.

As for another project in the works, Ranahan tells of two he is working on now.
“I’m in the midst of writing the next one I will film, and I’ve already gotten a few drafts of the one I want to film after that is done,” Ranahan said. “The one I will hopefully be filming by the end of 2017 is a dark comedy about divorce.”
The film, “Lost Signals,” is now available for download (not rated) on the distribution website Gumroad.