Noogie’s Time to Shine, a film based on the novel by Green Bay native Jim Knipfel, will premiere at The Tarlton Theatre on Saturday, Dec. 6, followed by a discussion about the film and accessibility with Knipfel, director Eric Horn and audio engineer Andy Slater.

In their debut feature, Austin-based co-directors Erik Horn and Bradley Parrett have crafted a fast-paced, hilarious, serpentine and visually inventive film, and did so with virtually no money. In so doing they invented a new movie genre: slapstick noir.

Shot on location in Austin, NYC, Miami and parts in between, the production was strictly out of the Roger Corman school of no-budget guerrilla filmmaking, grabbing shots when and where they could when no one was looking.

When “Noogie” was filmed in 2015, few of the actors — many making their screen debuts here — were well known outside of Austin’s indie film and stand-up circles.

Since then several have gone on to much bigger things.

Brandon Potter (Noogie) is now an in-demand actor, perhaps best known these days for his starring role as Quintas on the hit TV series “The Chosen.”

Lee Eddy (Det. Stone) has since appeared in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the recent reboot of “The Toxic Avenger” and dozens of other movies and TV series.

Along with several other projects, Sanjay Rao (FBI Agent Jake Meyers) co-starred in Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” and an upcoming limited-run series about the Sean Diddy Combs trial.

And for indie music fans, Mike Wiebe (FBI Agent Sven Ludkvasen) is the frontman for the pop-punk bands Draculas and The Riverboat Gamblers.

Accessibility

There are more blind movie fans out there than you might realize, but until recently they’d been cut off from fully appreciating something they love.
Although it’s becoming increasingly commonplace, most sighted audiences remain unaware of audio description (AD) tracks for movies and TV shows.

An AD track is a separate audio track on which a narrator describes what’s happening on the screen, but in a way that doesn’t interfere with the film’s dialogue or significant sound effects.

In accessibility terms, they’re akin to closed captioning for the deaf, but while closed captioning allows deaf viewers to follow a film’s dialogue, an audio description track allows blind audiences to follow a film’s visuals.

In essence, an AD track turns movies into radio dramas for audience members who can’t see the screen.

Jim Knipfel, the author of the source novel as well as the film’s Executive Producer, is blind.

His celebrated memoir Slackjaw details his experience with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP).

Despite his blindness, he was on-set in Austin during principal photography back in 2015, and a year earlier joined the core production crew on a madcap road trip from Miami to NYC to grab some second-unit footage.

Andy Slater, a blind composer and sound designer who also suffers from RP, did the final mix of the film’s audio, and spearheaded Noogie’s AD track.

The AD track is narrated by Knipfel himself — the team felt it was an original and comically ironic approach to accessibility, and Knipfel imbues it with his own unique voice and point of view.

The film will proudly offer the audio description track for all screenings, and actively encourages sighted audiences to experience the film with audio description to shine a light on accessible cinema.