Andrea Stetson characterizes herself as an amateur filmmaker. She submitted a film to the Bonita Springs Short Film Festival six years ago on a lark. Now she’s a festival mainstay.
“Every year has a theme,” Stetson pointed out. “The first year was ‘The Secrets of Bonita’ and my bunnies, my English Lop bunnies, have very long ears so in that one the bunnies were whispering the secrets of Bonita into each other's very, very long ears. The second year was ‘Ice Cream That's Blue’ and it was kind of a spoof on Dr. Seuss's ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ So they had blue ice cream and they were saying I will not eat it on the beach, I will not eat it with a peach, I will not eat it in the park, I will not eat it in the dark, and so we were going all around town and with this blue ice cream which was melting.”
Year three depicted the bunnies riding out Hurricane Ian in an interior bathroom as three feet of storm surge poured into Stetson’s home.
“That one … had a surprise ending with what the bunnies were really doing in the bathroom,” Stetson said.
This year, Stetson’s entry is titled “Sounds of Bonita.”
“This year, the bunnies are basically hopping around to different sites in Bonita Springs listening to … sounds of music from the Sugar Shack, sounds of a fire truck, sounds of dogs in the dog park, a rooster crowing, cat meowing, just different sounds all over Bonita,” Stetson said. “And, of course, bunnies are rather quiet animals, so the story is kind of a sort of spoof. It's kind of funny. They're trying to find their sound and, in the end, they find a special sound that they could make.”
The Bonita Springs Short Film Festival runs from 7 to 9 p.m. April 16 at Prado Stadium 12 in Spring Creek Plaza.
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The Bonita Springs Short Film Festival is a red-carpet event with filmmakers and patrons gathering outside Prado Stadium 12 about an hour before the festival begins screening the evening’s films. There are hors d'oeuvres and a marquee and director’s chairs for photo opps and selfies.
“There's a big fountain everyone sits around and just kind of mingles before the festival and then you go inside to the real movie theater and it's really exciting to see your film not on your phone, not on your computer, but you're seeing it on the screen in the movie theater,” Stetson said.
This year, the organizers received 40 entries. They chose to screen nine.
“They've had as many as 12 or 13,” Stetson said.
Excerpts from all of the submissions are presented in an opening montage.
“So, everybody gets a glimpse of your film even if it’s not one of the ones that gets screened,” Stetson said. “So, everybody gets three or four seconds of their film being shown during this five- or six-minute montage.”
The evening ends with the presentation of awards for, among other things, best film, audience choice and best depiction of Bonita Springs.
“I won that one the last two years,” said Stetson.
Because the festival runs one night only, there are no Q&A or talkback sessions following each screening. But there’s plenty of discussion — along with cake — in the lobby after all of the films have ended.
More about Oliver and Daphne
The stars of “Sounds of Bonita,” Oliver and his twin, Daphne, are English Lops.
“They have really, really long ears,” said Stetson, extending Daphne’s ears horizontally from her head. “If they're measured from tip-to-tip across the head, it's about 24 inches of ear and they just photograph really well and they take videos very well.
While the bunnies are, by nature, quiet animals, they do love attention.
“I bring the bunnies to the event,” Stetson said. “They're always super popular when we're walking on the red carpet and when they sit in the director's chair and all the people come over and they're probably the most popular actors in the theater.”
Stetson actually has seven rabbits, but she typically only uses two at a time in her filmmaking projects “because they won’t all cooperate at the same time.”
Stetson grew up in Brooklyn, New York, with three dogs and four cats.
“When I went off to Northwestern, I really missed not having a pet, so a friend of mine said, 'Well, you know, a lot of people here in the dorm just sneak in pets. It just has to be something quiet.' So we went off to a pet store in Chicago and I had no idea what I was going to get but I knew it had to be something that was quiet and clean that I could smuggle into a dorm room and then we saw this bunny, this black and white bunny that I named Tristan and I was like this is perfect. They're litter pan trained. They're clean. They're quiet. No one's going to know it's in my dorm room and I got Tristan. After that I always had bunnies.”
She also has a protective 70-pound dog.
As a filmmaker
Stetson is fairly low-tech.
“I shoot the video just with my phone and then I have DaVinci Resolve, which is just a free photo and video editing system, and I just put them into DaVinci Resolve and edit it together and make a video.”
Those skills came in handy in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
“Our house was flooded and I shot video of the storm coming in, the heavy winds. It shows the house being flooded, it shows other people's houses having damage, but throughout it all the bunnies, who are normally in their bunny house, are in the bathrooms being safe.”
To be fair, Stetson wasn’t shooting the video for the express purpose of making a film that she could enter in the Bonita Springs Short Film Festival.
“The video was just devastating,” Stetson said. “Water coming into the house and then after the storm driving down the street and seeing piles of debris eight, 10 feet high of people's couches, their furniture, their entire lives. At the same time, I had all this video of the bunnies in the bathroom which was kind of funny. So, when it came time to put something together for the film festival the following year, I just had to find a way to put the two together. So, the way I edited the video is to make it cut back and forth from the damage, to the bunnies in the bathroom, to the recovery, to the bunnies in the bathroom.”
Last year’s theme was "The Magic of Bonita."
“So, I had my bunny Theodore dressed in a full magician's costume, and he was going around Bonita examining all the magical things in Bonita, like the Shangri-La’s Fountain of Youth and the beach at sunset,” Stetson noted. “A lot of my videos end with something surprising, so it was kind of like a surprise ending. It was like now wait until you see the real magic of Bonita, and the bunnies are doing something very, very funny.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
