GUIDE FOR YOUNGER VIEWERS

Our repeated experience showing “The Mystery” to younger viewers is this:

  • For the first part of the film, “I don’t get it”

  • In the middle, “Whoa! Scary music!”

  • By the end, “That was REAL, wasn’t it? It REALLY happened?”

It can help if older viewers orient younger viewers to the various layers in the film.

These layers are:

  • In the “present,” April Kai has devised a “trail of clues” for her friends Vivian, Tigris and Zak

  • In the course of following that trail of clues, the 4 friends chance upon another trail of clues laid down — as it turns out — 50 years prior

  • April Kai, Vivian, Tigris and Zak follow the 50-year-old trail of clues to its end, an end that seems to “just end” — the end is a “mystery”

  • The 50-year-trail of clues was prepared for Joyce — and “we” have no idea who Joyce was

  • The 4 friends also have no idea who created the trail of clues they are following — but they end up calling the trail-of-clues creator Gwendolyn

  • The 4 friends are all in Film Club, an after-school activity

  • They decide to make a film about finding and following the 50-year-old trail of clues, a film they call, “The Mystery at Grace & St. Peter’s”

  • The film includes flashbacks to Gwendolyn creating her trail of clues

  • What “we” are watching is April Kai, Vivian, Tigris and Zak’s dramatic re-enactment of their adventure

  • The Big Reveal comes as they try to show their film at the Baltimore Film Festival — and the mystery is solved

  • Throughout, April Kai, Vivian, Tigris and Zak are interviewed by a TV reporter about their film — this was our 2012 attempt to help younger viewers track

  • Yes, some of the music is “scary” — but the actors were never scared; indeed, they’d often be giggling away when the camera wasn’t rolling!

“The Mystery” was developed with 5G students — see “The Making of—” below (bottom of this web page) — and it all made perfect sense to us while filming!

In retrospect, perhaps we should have worked hard to make all the layers crystal clear!

It may help to watch “The Making of—” first, although we have no data about how successful this strategy is!

Hopefully older viewers can help younger viewers “get” what’s going on…

… and enjoy their response in the end: “Did that REALLY happen?”

Enjoy!

• Link for “A Dragon With Wings” (2013 film)