Chapter 7
Riley Hohl Productions
Assuming that you haven’t been around our school and not heard the news of one of our projects/movies, my friends and I have created a group that we like to call Riley Hohl Productions. Throughout the years we have also thought of several different movie ideas and some we even started but never finished. Riley Hohl Productions has quite the histor
y such as the origin, the movies created, and the memories captured. I’ll never forget the inspiration that got my friends and I to start this legacy. Before our group was created, I had always found movies and film making fascinating. My fascination expanded when my cousin Derik Morgan approached me and asked if I would like to be apart of their movie that his friends and him were making. Their movie was called Danger Zone Steve and the Sherman Chronicles and the plot was basically the main character, my cousin, was an ex-cop whose daughter got kidnapped by a drug lord. The role he offered me was to be a little, Asian Kung-Fu master who was to train Danger Zone Steve so that he could have the strength to save his daughter. I was offered this part because at the time I was in elementary school and knew Taekwondo. And after seeing the amount of extreme joy and fun that came from the making of his movie, my brother, Logan, decided to get some of his friends together and make a bunch of short videos every once in a while. Then a friend of his, Bryce Thomson, got an editing program and they all got together to make a movie which lead into the creation of The Willowridge Massacre. The story to their movie was a professional golfer, played by Adam Bohland, intentionally killed the wife of a teacher by hitting her in the head with a golf shot but then was never placed under arrest. So the teacher, played by Bryce Thomson, took revenge on the golfer by killing him and throwing him into a lake. But the golfer rises from the dead and begins killing people around the lake while the teacher happens to be having a field trip there. It quickly becomes a struggle to survive and to find a way to put the dead golfer to his final resting place. I was again given a role in this film as one of the high school students, but because I was only a 6th grader my character had some sort of problem that made me look young forever. After the influence of these two feature films, I felt it was necessary that my friends and I would get together and create a group to make films. And so Riley Hohl Productions was made. Our first project was Revolutionary War Project for 7th grade Social Studies in Mrs. When we finished the film and turned it in, the entire school was in an uproar. Riley Hohl Productions became a huge hit! We immediately followed up by creating our next production which became what we would like to consider one of our first movies and not just one of our simple projects. The movie we made was named Mutant which was simply a parody of the movie Predator. This film caused quite a stir amongst our family and friends. It wasn’t long before everybody was anticipating the next big hit. And not after long we created Star Wars in the summer going into 8th grade. This movie was obviously a parody of the Star Wars series with our own storyline. To this day Star Wars is our longest movie yet standing at around an hour and 30 minutes. This was also one of the biggest leaps we had taken into using music and sound effects. Almost 90% of the film has some sort of sound effect or music in the background. This film also has one of our longest training montages standing at around ten freakishly long minutes. Regardless, this movie was a huge hit at our family Christmas because I made a preview for it at Thanksgiving. But this film was a rather large undertaking so most of the cast was exhausted and we didn’t make another film until late 8th grade year. This film was for our 8th grade history class and it was called World War II Project. This production was the first of our movies to hit YouTube. This film was a pretty big highlight point in Riley Hohl Productions because we felt that we had been getting better but we hadn’t reached our maximum potential. This is when we tried to film a type of horror movie about a bullied kid in middle school coming back years later to kill those who bullied him. Very quickly into production I cut it short because it didn’t take me long to realize that what we were doing was not only ridiculously hard but also stupid. Some of the cast agreed with me and felt it was necessary while the other half felt demoralized because of some of the little work they had put into the film was being trashed and they had to deal with it. This created a long period of time where we didn’t attempt at filming anything for almost a year and a half. We then got a smaller cast together to start our next movie called Mercenary. This film was basically a mob movie that was making fun of a few other films like Wanted. This movie may have had one of our best intros to a movie yet but the rest of the movie wasn’t making up for that. Early into production tensions began to flare because some of the cast was not cooperating and wanted to do other things with their time. Problems that derived from this was simply never finding cast members to have time to film and when they did they wouldn’t stop complaining, causing them to have terrible acting and frustrating me beyond belief. Through pure anger, frustration, and the draining of will to film the movie, I stopped the creation of the film after seeing it was going nowhere. Some cast members wanted to keep filming so we tried picking up on the movie again almost a year later but quickly stopped because the problems we had before were still there and I wasn’t going to deal with it. After our longest break between movies, we finally picked up the English III project that was inevitably named Huckleberry Finn Project. After this we felt that we had learned a lot from our prior mistakes and were capable of getting back into the grove of things. Huckleberry Finn Project also revealed to us that our acting talent and comedy skills have increased quite a bit over the years and we were ready to possibly start filming again. The only problem was summer was coming up and everybody wanted to just have fun with it being technically being their last summer in high school and also football on the horizon. But almost immediately when football was over we made the 90’s Project for Mr. Johnson in Current Affairs. This is our most recent project and it was probably our biggest hit. Our thoughts on our acting skills after Huckleberry Finn were correct in that we had gotten a lot better. Almost immediately when I went to school the day after the movie was posted on YouTube, I received comments from almost every student in the school. Some people I didn’t know approached me and even some of the school faculty asked me about it. It was a blockbuster. With the moment and success driven by the 90’s Project, Riley Hohl Productions is seeking a new creation to put on the big screen. Many ideas have been thrown up in the air such as a Paranormal Activity spin off, a military sniper type of movie, or even a sequel to one of our older movies. But the cast is torn between which movie we would like to do. And it has been brought to my attention that a project for English IV is coming up that may require a Riley Hohl Production. Potentially another big hit on the horizon? We shall see. There is an endless list of things that could be said about Riley Hohl Productions, such as the small memories that have made us laugh for years and years to come. It is amazing to think how far we’ve come from just simply following in my cousin and brother’s foot steps. Then it is even more amazing to think of how many lives we’ve touched with the joy that is brought from our movies. Our movies are and always will be the heart and legacy of Riley Hohl Productions.
