JACKSON – If the Jersey Devil needed to find a new home beyond Leeds Point it isn’t hard to believe that of all the places he could go, the horned, winged creature would relocate to the woods of Jackson Township.
Jon and Samantha Allen-Bastianelli formed a family film production team, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow Productions. The Jackson filmmakers have another project about to take flight.
“Our family’s journey has been an adventure of its own – we spent four and a half years living, traveling, and actively filming full-time on the road in our RV before settling down right here in Jackson. Now, we are utilizing our local surroundings to create a project heavily inspired by New Jersey folklore,” Samantha Allen-Bastianelli said.
The family won an award for the short film “The Kampy Kids Meet Bigfoot” at the Jersey Shore Film Festival. Following on that success, they recently debuted part one of a three-part scripted family sci-fi adventure series, “The Kampy Kids: Close Encounters.”
She compared the project as mix between the iconic 1980s film “The Goonies” meets “Scooby-Doo” and “Gravity Falls” and it is set right in the New Jersey Pinelands.
Their short film adventure catalogue includes: “The Kampy Kids Meet Bigfoot,” “The Kampy Kids and The Ghost Dinosaur,” and “The Kampy Kids and Close Encounters of the Pizza Kind (a sci-fi themed alien mystery adventure).”
“Our talented kid actors play a team of young ‘cryptid catchers’ investigating the woods of Jackson. What makes the project unique behind the scenes is our creature effects lead: a local Jackson mom and alumnus of the SyFy channel’s FaceOff TV series who is currently hand-fabricating a massive, Hollywood-level Jersey Devil creature costume in our workshop for the upcoming episodes,” Samantha Allen-Bastianelli told The Jackson Times.
She said the first installment is “a tight, five-minute film showcasing our studio’s high-end practical effects. We are currently launching a 10-day production backer round to fund part two in October. Right now, we are in the middle of filming our “Close Encounters” miniseries. We have two more episodes before we wrap that up and begin production on “The Kampy Kids: Terror in the Pines” series.
“We aren’t prepared to share the Jersey Devil costume just yet,” she said, but she did share some details on the process of creating the costume of the antagonist from the Close Encounters series played by their 12-year-old son Jonathan also known as “JJ.”
“It was a one-piece foam latex prosthetic designed, sculpted, molded, applied, and painted by myself. The kids all attend acting school at Actors Playground in Wall and have received scholarships through the Applaud Our Kids Foundation. The foundation is amazing,” she added.
“Both of their grandfathers had roles. Bill Allen played the Pizza Shop Owner/answered the phone, and their other grandfather Tito Bastianelli played our delivery guy,” she added.
The family started out making movies together pretty early on. Allen-Bastianelli said she and her husband “got together in film school, though we have known each other since childhood. We actually met while looking at a bug under a bush when we were 10.”
“I went on to get cast on the reality show FaceOff. When I came home, we had our son Jonathan and started creating with him pretty immediately. He has wanted to make videos since he was super little. We made some little commercials, wrote a few scripts, made some YouTube videos,” she noted.
She added, it was “kind of always there as a hobby. As Jonathan got older, he got way more interested in the behind the scenes and creature creation. His younger siblings followed suit and they are full on little actors now. Our middle guy Alexander is our camera guy, he wants to learn all about being behind the scenes.”
“During our first actual film we actually broke down while RVing in Utah, Red Fleet State Park in the middle of nowhere, and had to wait on a part. We decided to oblige Jonathan’s request to make a family film about a ghost dinosaur,” she remarked.
Bastianelli said, “we had so much fun with that one that we made our second film, ‘The Kampy Kids Meet Bigfoot,’ and put a little more production value in it. We met with Cliff Barackman from Animal Planet and it was just a really exciting project. Alexander actually filmed the entire scene (behind the camera) with him when he was only 7.”
She noted that “JJ is obsessed with our creatures and wants to play every one. He loves being in full makeup. He was in the alien suit for seven hours for this last shoot. We try to get the shoots done in no more than four-hour blocks, but he was ready to rock and roll and the makeup takes time so we shot for two of the installments in the one day. He believes the alien was his best performance to date.”
JJ wore a different pull of that mask for Kevin Smith’s most recent film competition. His mom said, “we had 36 hours from concept to submission. They give you the rules, you get 36 hours to create a film and that’s that. We were chosen as finalists and screened in his cinema.”
“We encourage the kids to express themselves and asked them to pick out outfits for their characters that reflect their personalities,” she added.
Their daughter Charlotte said she wasn’t sure how she came up with her on-screen character. “I don’t know, just being me! I love pink and big bows but also adventure and rock and roll!”
JJ said he came up with look of his character through inspiration from “Bill Nye the Science guy and a love for knowledge.”
When asked where he would like to see The Kampy Kids go after the Pine Barrens, JJ replied “On a pirate ship!”
Their mother noted, “we usually talk about the idea and then get a script written overnight, we will talk about it during breakfast and make some changes. This last one we filmed over three days and some change. We are making movies the old-fashioned way.”
There is a scene in the Close Encounters installment where mom orders a “Kampy Kids Special” from Dinotastic Pizza Land when the mystery of the unidentified backyard alien starts to unfold. No one seems to notice the floating saucer hovering over the family home, not even the delivery man who knocks on the door and introduces himself as “pizza guy.”
Sadly, the family’s dinner is levitated up to the saucer to Pizza Guy’s shock and horror. “Hey you know you need to pay for that” he yells up to the spaceship.
Spoiler alert: the alien flies off with the two boxes of pizza and the end credits roll…end?
Bastianelli is urging everyone to “check out our website to get a feel for who we are! We have been involved and spoken on some panels at a few local film festivals. We won two awards at the Jersey Shore Film Festival and have a few recorded interviews/panels from them.” Learn more about their adventures by visiting TheKampyKids.com and watch their recent adventure at youtu.be/m29RuxLMSRU?si=wcxcFESyZuGWt3Nt
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