High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Sitting on Top of Planet Earth : Video: What started as a school assignment has become a love--and a business--for four El Dorado seniors.

In the wee hours of the morning, when most people are sound asleep, the four members of Planet Earth Productions can often be found shooting and re-shooting scenes in search of the perfect camera angle.

“Our parents don’t take too kindly to our filming because a lot of times it’s at odd hours.” explained Tim J. Galvin, 17. “You don’t film at 12 in the afternoon, it’s at 3 in the morning that you are finishing up some shots in the family room, and you’re playing a soundtrack.”

Yet the long and odd hours have not kept the four El Dorado High School seniors--Jonathan Klein, 17; Gavin Carlton, 17; Steven Dawson, 16, and Galvin--from doing what they love most: making movies.

“It started in eighth-grade drama class,” Klein said. “The class was kind of disorganized, and our teacher gave us free rein to go off and try video things.”

Since then, Planet Earth Productions, named after a globe in Klein’s bedroom, is not only getting its business license but it has also been responsible for three full-length movies and a number of documentaries and parodies.

Assignments from school, including a stop-action “Star Wars” movie using the toy action figures, often served as excuses for the foursome to make videos.

In fact, their current project, “The Silence of the Limits,” a parody of “The Silence of the Lambs,” grew out of a trigonometry writing assignment.

“We got the idea from throwing around names and putting trig words in for ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ dialogue,” Klein said.

Added Dawson: “Then it got out of control. It turned into a 70-page book that we spent a great deal of time on. It went way beyond the trig assignment.”

It went all the way to being copyrighted as a screenplay and is currently being filmed, a process that rarely runs without a hitch.

“Our most (interesting) experience was when we went to Disneyland Hotel and interviewed the guests,” Galvin said.

“We got about an hour of the funniest video we have ever taken, and a security man confiscated our tape. It was getting late and we could have sat and argued with him, but we had to get home.”

“It wasn’t like we found out some great secret about Disneyland anyway,” said Carlton, who also taped a documentary on meat for his history class after reading muckraker Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

“We got it all on tape, and we were interviewing the butchers” at a grocery store, he said. “It was really funny, and then this guy came up to us at the end and asked, ‘Are you allowed to have this camera here?’

“We said we had permission, and then I asked if we could get him on tape. He got so scared and put his hand over the lens and almost ran away.”

Their most serious encounter with the authorities came while doing some preliminary filming for their upcoming science fiction movie “Rise from Rorigard.”

“We had actually taken a vehicle (that we owned) up on the grass in a park, something we shouldn’t have done, but we needed to use the headlights,” said Galvin, explaining why the police stopped to question them.

“We were all dressed up because it was a futuristic movie, so we had guns and swords,” Klein said. “I opened up my trunk and the police are pulling out these three-foot swords.”

Luckily, they believed the boys and let them go.

“The cops are kind of shy of video cameras these days, I don’t know why,” Galvin joked. “We’ve never really been hassled by cops. They are usually pretty understanding.”

The support of their parents, however, has been harder to win.

Carlton encountered problems in the beginning. “My family is real business-oriented, so I told them that this is what I’m going to do. They’ve accepted it and have been backing me up.”

In the homes of Klein and Dawson, grades are of first and foremost importance. “If I wasn’t getting A’s in school, I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time on this kind of stuff,” Klein said. “My parents will support me to the ends of the earth as long as I take care of my school business first.”

Said Galvin: “My parents like to see my shows, but when I’m going to rehearsals and so on they are saying to me, ‘You’re wasting your life away,’ because my brother is very successful. He was just ranked No. 1 in his law class at UCLA, so we are on different ends.

“Finally my parents are starting to realize we are different people, but it’s still a very reluctant realization.”

Planet Earth Productions has plans to expand its horizons to include music and publishing.

“We have a lot of friends and acquaintances (with) musical talent, like small bands,” Klein said. “What we have wanted to do with Planet Earth Production is give some organization to those bands. We want to be able to record them and maybe sell, for a small price around campus, a collection of the bands’ music and maybe help someone along in their career with audio tapes, maybe video or even organize a small concert.”

They are also looking to local coffeehouses for the opportunity to sell student-written books or poetry and student-made audio tapes.

“I really believe in youth as opposed to Establishment,” Dawson said. “Right now, I think we are at our most creative, free-spirited point.”

The company’s biggest obstacle is lack of money for equipment and supplies.

“We just wish that some company or somebody with a little bit of capital could help us bring out these talents,” Galvin said. “There are a lot of undiscovered things, and youth talent is something we really want to bring out.”