While working on a documentary, two Ball State students were voluntarily handcuffed together for 10 consecutive days as they traveled from Muncie, Ind., to Ottawa, Ontario.
The two students, senior Corey Rudell and sophomore Andrew Neylon, mailed the key to their handcuffs to a woman living in Canada. Their journey to retrieve the key became the storyline to their film, "Me & My Shadow."
Rudell and Neylon worked with senior Patrick Ball as the director of photography and primary camera, freshmen Danny Delaney as grip and secondary camera, Marcus Carroll as audio and Chloe Anagnos as the producer.
The students plan to first enter a half hour cut of their film in the Frog Baby Film Festival in March. After that, Neylon said it is up to their discretion but they are planning on entering full length versions of their film in several other festivals.
"I really want to show it off in terms of just showing people, showing the people at the school something they've been waiting, at that point, six months to see," Neylon, English literature major, said.
The purpose of the film was to explore relationships and cooperation. Rudell said he noticed that the Canadians were more helpful to them and their crew than the Americans.
"Just as a generalization, Canadians were a lot more helpful and a lot more polite and friendlier, and more interested in hearing about us than any Americans were," the double major in theatrical studies and telecommunications said.
While on their trip, the students visited several cities, including Washington, D.C., where they were asked to leave the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. They were also asked to leave the Lincoln Center in New York, the Canadian Parliament building and several Starbucks and McDonald's.
In their documentary, the students interviewed several people that they met along the way. One interview particularly impacted both Rudell and Neylon.
The crew met a 15- or 16-year-old boy in a McDonald's in Pennsylvania. After they told him what their project was about, the boy said that they were "like heroes." Neylon said the boy was very excited about their project and seemed interested in it, so they interviewed him in the parking lot.
What he said in the interview ended up being in the trailer for the film: "This is a great story to tell people. I think that's just the most important to get out. Because friends are the closest. They're like family."
The boy also shared with the crew that he did not really have any friends. Rudell said that interview changed him as a person.
"The fact that this kid didn't have that and yearned for it — and the fact that I had that at my fingertips and I wasn't taking advantage of it — it hurt me," he said. "I felt bad. I felt selfish."
In addition to impacting his relationships with people, Neylon said working on the film and being in front of the camera made him feel like he had to be interesting and exciting at all times.
"You get this sort of warped perspective of yourself and the world around you over time," he said. "It's not a healthy setting, really. I ended up really not liking it. And it was very difficult because I was constantly thinking about making the film as well as being in the film."
Rudell, on the other hand, said this project has made him have a better perspective of humanity because of all of the help they received from strangers along the way.
"There's this stigma attached and the fact that I can say I want to form a relationship, I want to have an intimate relationship with somebody, I want to bear my soul to somebody," he said. "Before this, I never would have even considered it."
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