The black-and-white movie was only about 15 minutes long and featured two actors playing three characters. Those actors were also the directors, the producers, the editors - the entire team that created what was now being viewed by more than 200 people, some of them professional filmmakers.

The movie's team members were also only 16 years old.

Now 17 and 18, Patrick Griffen of Saratoga and Craig Blaine of Monte Sereno were praised for the talent, creativity and movie-making skills they had developed on their own since elementary school. It was certainly a moment of achievement when the audience voted theirs as one of two movies - out of the 14 independents shown in the Reel Beginnings portion of the festival - that it would most like to see again.

For Griffen and Blaine, it was also a moment of sweet vindication.

But more on that later.


Reel Beginnings

Griffen and Blaine weren't always the movie-making maestros they are today. No - at one point in time, they were just two first-graders at Saratoga's Argonaut Elementary School who lived down the street from each other. But that's where it all began.

Griffen is now a senior at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, and Blaine is a senior at Los Gatos High School. They've been friends a long time, and it's fun for them to take a trip together down memory lane and recall those early years - if they can agree on what exactly happened then. They were only 6, after all.

One thing they are sure of is that they owe their initial interest in making their own movies to Blaine's Los Angeles cousins, who would come to visit and bring copies of the movies they had made with their parents' video camera, and then include an awestruck Griffen and Blaine in their local efforts.

"We were impressed," Blaine says of backyard antics, recorded for posterity, of the children playing make-believe. "We just thought they were great. We just decided we could do it."

Their first solo attempt in the second grade, however, ended in bloodshed. Maybe.

"I think he's making this up, trying to make it more interesting than it really was," Blaine says over Griffen's protests that, yes, it was when they were making their first movie that Blaine accidentally dumped a can of toys onto Griffen's head and cracked it open, necessitating a trip to the emergency room and a couple of staples. Blaine eventually acquiesces.

"It was a long time ago, Patrick," he explains.

Their second try was when they were in the third or fourth grade, they say. They decided to create a spoof of the Saturday Night Live "Wayne's World" sketch, itself a spoof of a late-night talk show. Playing two movie critics, their topic was the recently released Mortal Kombat II video game, and they called the movie Video Game Madness.

"We've lost that movie; we don't know where it is," Blaine says.

But the dozens that remain tell the tale of their early efforts. Griffen and Blaine say that they would pull out the camera and then create characters, dialogue and plot as they went along, adhering to a very loosely sketched idea they'd come up with before they began to record. The videos are long and rambling, they say, as the two acted extemporaneously with no real direction or concept of an audience. Their audience was just themselves and their parents and friends, they say.

Movie-making was a fun after-school or weekend game that the two boys played for years, while others were perhaps more focused on games like Mortal Kombat II. But then they got to middle school.


Gaining Confidence

Griffen's and Blaine's passion for film was given new life in Brian Safine's seventh-grade core curriculum class. (The class taught history and English language and literature and was three periods long, Griffen says. "Was it three? I thought it was two," Blaine says.)

An early class assignment was to videotape a rendition of the classic tale Beowulf. Griffen and Blaine teamed up and created a somewhat grisly movie with limbs from Grendel's attack flying around on impact, they say.

But Safine was impressed. By then, the two were experimenting with technique - stopping the camera to change angles and frame scenes - and they were learning to judge the appropriate length of a scene and developing a sense of timing. They also now had viewers who weren't parents and friends, as their movies were shown to the class.

Safine encouraged them to continue submitting assignments in the form of movies. They probably made "at least three" or "maybe five or six" or "maybe eight." Again, it was a long time ago.

And it was also middle school.

"In the eighth grade, we kind of had a falling out, as we tend to do," Griffen says, and touches on the subject of an interloper friend, about whom the two argue and laugh. But they agree on one thing:

"We didn't make many movies" that year, Blaine says.

"I don't think we made any," Griffen says.


Getting Serious

By then, Blaine's family had moved from Saratoga to Monte Sereno. And the next year, Griffen chose to attend Bellarmine, while Blaine went to Saratoga High School.

And then one day during freshman year, Blaine called Griffen up to see what he was doing. Griffen came over, and they dug out the video camera.

"You can see really quickly that we'd gotten a lot better," Blaine says of the new installments in their video archive.

That year, they made between two and three movies every weekend, they say. They began to set up a tripod. They also began to develop strange characters with odd quirks and twitches, funny accents and sometimes outlandish costumes. They got to be comfortable in front of the camera, just being wacky and weird with each other.

"It's kind of good to cut loose and be weird," Blaine says. "It's kind of therapeutic, you know."

Some of that, they sheepishly admit, was due to their earlier involvement with the Saratoga Drama Group, from which they learned how to, well, act. But they prefer film to theater because subtleties and nuance are somewhat easier to get across, they say.

They had stopped showing their movies to others, at least on a regular basis, but they began to watch their own work over and over, critiquing what they saw and getting ideas to make improvements.

They decided to enter Saratoga High's Oscar Night, in which student filmmakers would show their movies and then receive awards for best picture, best actor and actress, and the like. Freshman year, Blaine won for best actor. The two decided to try again their sophomore year, with the goal of winning best picture.


Bitter Disappointment

So they took all that they had learned - "keep it shorter, and we can't be too weird," Blaine says - and worked to develop an award-winning film.

The result of that effort was the movie Permanent, the same movie they submitted to Reel Beginnings and there received a Spotlight Award - for being the most highly regarded film in its age category - and an Audience Appreciation Award - for being chosen by the audience as its favorite film.

But that wasn't even in their minds then, they say (and it couldn't have been, since Reel Beginnings didn't exist then). They were just concerned about showing the film to a group of their peers.

"We made the movie knowing we were going to enter it" at the Saratoga High contest, Griffen says.

"It's different when you're going to be showing it to people," Blaine says.

The movie starts off with Griffen as a latchkey kid, Burt Bagonia, who, in a voice-over when we meet him, says that he "has a problem - not an ordinary problem." Bagonia can't do his homework.

An oddly androgynous friend of his, played by Blaine, encourages Bagonia to consult the "yellows," or Yellow Pages, and solicit the help of a hypnotist, who arrives at Bagonia's door almost as soon as he's hung up the phone. But this is no ordinary hypnotist. He has a serious confidence problem - or, as his creator, Blaine, says, he "doesn't know what he's doing."

The movie is full of interesting angles, with Bagonia's face framed in his side-view mirror as he drives home from school or seen through the car's steering wheel. But Griffen and Blaine incorporated new angles by stopping and starting scenes rather than following the more traditional method of filming whole scenes at a variety of angles and later editing them together. Aside from a sequence of a hypnotized Bagonia running around in his subconscious, which was later edited to show the negative of the picture, the movie popped out nearly complete as a digital videotape from the camera.

Photograph by George Sakkestad In their movies, Patrick Griffen, left, and Craig Blaine try to capture quirky characters in odd situations, but never use scripts.

"That's Craig's directorial genius at work," Griffen says. "He definitely has an eye for that kind of thing. It's definitely influenced me."

But that doesn't keep them from trying new things out as they go - they have never written a script or developed storyboards. Instead, their modus operandi is to improvise while the tape records.

When they had a finished film they were proud of, they submitted it for the high school event, and that night they watched their competition and grew increasingly convinced that they would win.

So when they didn't - a fact they attribute to the high school film society's preference for the works of its own members - they were disillusioned. For his junior year, Blaine transferred from Saratoga High to Los Gatos High, though the two events were unrelated, he says. And they didn't make too many more movies after that.


Sweet Success

This past summer Griffen and Blaine learned about Reel Beginnings, an event that showcases the work of local filmmakers prior to the Los Gatos Film Festival. They and a friend thought briefly about trying to record a new movie to submit by the Aug. 1 deadline, but Griffen was heading to wrestling camp and Blaine was busy with his music and art. So, they decided to give Permanent another try, and sent it in. Being chosen for screening would have proven that it deserved to win at Saratoga High, they say, but their confidence was a little shaken by that loss.

Their submission was one of three movies sent in by people under the age of 21, says Reel Beginnings chairwoman Joanne Talesfore, and it was the only film in that category chosen by the judges to be included in the Aug. 22 screening. Out of the total of 28 entries submitted to Reel Beginnings, 14 were chosen to be shown.

"It really was to bring together communities here in Los Gatos and uncover that part of the community that enjoys creating films," Talesfore says of Reel Beginnings. "We really wanted to encourage young filmmakers in our town to make films."

Griffen and Blaine say they enjoyed the film festival, meeting other moviemakers and, of course, receiving an award or two. But they say they wish there were more movies made by people their age, and are looking forward to meeting more of them in college. Griffen hopes to attend Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles next year and study in the school's film program. Blaine is a little dubious about studying film in college - "The best way to learn is to actually do it," he says. But they both want to turn their talents into careers, even if doing films their way - no blockbuster hits - means working day jobs to support their real passion.

They are proud of the movie, but now as they watch it they cringe when they see things they could have done better.

"It's a good feeling to get an award, but it just kind of made me want to make another movie," Blaine says. "I knew I could do better."

Griffen says he's not satisfied yet, either. "I want to make movies to make me happy," he says.

"We just make movies 'cause that's what we like to do," Blaine says. "We're definitely going to make a lot more movies."

And they agree that making movies means making movies together.

"I can't really see myself making movies with anybody else," Griffen says.