Cowabunga! Ninja movie takes home top prize

No animals were hurt in the filming of this movie.

"Except me!" Engineering sophomore Matt Leiker exclaims, as he fingers the ninja sword-induced scar on his forearm, acquired in a Philadelphia graveyard over a month ago.

Eleven Digital Media and Design Penn Engineering students recently won $15,000 for first prize in the Reel Ninja Film Contest, sponsored by the video game company Activision and judged by producer Terence Chang and director John Woo of Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2 fame.

It was just 16 days before the contest's film submissions were due that DMD Associate Director Amy Calhoun sent a mass e-mail in a last minute effort to encourage her students to flex their creative muscles.

Engineering sophomore Joshua Gorin, who received the e-mail, forwarded it to Penn graduate Neil Chatterjee, and a few hours later, received three words that changed his life and bank account forever -- "Let's do it."

The duo set to work immediately -- they wrote a film script, searched for a proper graveyard, spent almost $700 on fake oozies and ninja swords and finished their homework.

The search for actors began.

Few boys could refuse the temptation of the ninja swords, fake blood and gratuitous violence that the film offered and thus, the full cast was soon assembled.

The film's plot involved a ninja fight scene in a graveyard between grave robbers and a ninja. In a suspenseful twist, kids enter the picture in the end -- which raised a problem.

"We knew we could get guns and swords and ninja costumes," Chatterjee says. "The problem was that we had no idea where we could get kids."

But their worries were assuaged when they managed to employ the grandchildren of Penn benefactor Gordon Bodek, and after six days of pre-production, the filming was set to begin. That Thursday, the cast gathered into a windowless room where they pulled out a box of fake firearms and got down to business.

"We figured we needed to give them all time to play with the guns," Chatterjee says. "We thought a bunch of black-masked guys running around a graveyard waving guns might not look so great in the times we are living in. So we wanted them to get it out of their system."

Penn's snow day also worked in the filmmakers' favor. "We originally wrote the script while picturing the film in the snow," Gorin says, describing the surprise of waking up that Friday to a winter wonderland. "But we figured there's no way we'll get snow, so we rewrote it."

Still, the snow actually proved to be more than they had bargained for -- Gorin ran around "the set" with two plastic Wawa bags on his feet, and the cold forced the crew to retreat between fight scenes to their car, whimpering for doughnut holes.

And the snow caused a unique problem for retakes. "After we would film once in a certain area, we couldn't film there again because of all the footprints," Gorin says.

After the shooting for the day, lead ninja Leiker says that when he returned to the Quadrangle in full ninja costume with his face covered, the Spectaguards would just swipe him through without a problem.

"Never once did they ask to see my face," he says.

Post-production -- or in the words of Chatterjee, "basically just insanity" -- began after two days of filming and consisted mainly of beating up fruit. Gorin and Chatterjee stocked up on melons and pretty much destroyed them in any way possible to generate noises -- the hardest to master being the "headbutt" -- for the fight scenes of the film.

"We couldn't get the right sound until Neil finally smashed a melon into his chest so hard that it knocked him over," Gorin says. "As he was lying there, I listened to the recording and said, 'That's good -- let's try that again.'"

In a little over two weeks, the film was finished. As Gorin was waiting in Houston Hall a few weeks later, he checked the contest's Web site, and the Web page loaded with the words "Congratulations to Josh Gorin."

Now that they have laid down their swords, all they have left to do is distribute the $15,000 cash prize amongst themselves -- through their own democratic system of "ninja points."

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