After several months of preparation the student produced film, “At the End of Eight,” comes to a wrap.

The film is about three college students who sneak inside the home of complete strangers as a part of a popular, yet illegal, game. The game requires the players to stay in the house for eight hours without being discovered. If they are successful, they win $10,000. However, the players soon find out they are not in an ordinary house.

The idea for this film all started when Rankin Bullard, senior theatre acting major from Colorado City and director, writer, cinematographer and editor of the film, was at a rehearsal a few ago.  

“Our director gave us an eight minute break and said ‘we’ll pick up where we left off at the end of eight’ and I thought it sounded like a great title so I wrote it in my notes on my phone,” Bullard said. “I have a strange habit of thinking of titles for films before I even have the story thought out.”

Bullard started writing the screenplay for the film in February of 2018 and finished it that summer; it ended up being 87 pages long. With most of the potential cast being out of town for the summer, filming was postponed until October 2018. 

“A few people backed out of crew positions due to scheduling conflicts and creative differences, so we were a very small team…we never had more than five crew members on set,” Bullard said. 

Filming was hard with all of the cast and crew being full time students, but they still managed to make it work by scheduling filming around everyones classes, rehearsals and jobs. 

After six months of writing the screenplay, four months of filming, and about seven months of editing, all of the hard work from February 2018 to October 2019 came to a close, with the film standing at one hour and sixteen minutes. 

“If someone were to ask me how this all came together, I would probably laugh at first because I still don’t know how we managed to do it,” Bullard said. “There were so many things we were willing to give up or spend less time on in order to get the entire movie done. We were very confident in our storytelling capabilities and we knew that at the heart of the film was the story and the authenticity of characters and plot.”

Along with other film projects, the trailer for “At the End of Eight” can be seen on the Beyond Star Films website which was founded by Bullard.