The time is 2023 and the first scene opens with Hunter Zapf-Kent, a Sedona Charter School student, playing the character of Marty, a typical 13-year-old interested in dinosaurs and science, as is his 10-year-old sister Sophie, played by fellow student Valentina Marcaccini.

“The kids build a time machine, which mom thinks is just a cute little science project, but it actually works,” film editor and Bryan Barrow of Rockhopper Adventures said, describing the Parangello Players videography class for grades one through six, which is wrapping up filming of the student movie project “Time Rescue” that the group has been working on since November. “They want to go to the days of the dinosaurs because they’ve seen ‘Jurassic Park’ and loved it,” Barrow said. “However, Mom tinkered with the buttons. So they actually got shot into the future [around] 2223, and it’s a world controlled by AI robots.” 

In the dystopian future or near present, they meet Professor Von Schwartz, played by Levi Kraut, who invented the robots that overthrow humanity and in turn imprison him.

“It feels good to play a mad scientist,” Kraut said right after practicing his evil laugh. “I have learned how to use the camera. I’ve learned how to turn it on to function and everything correctly. I’ve learned that [film is] kind of the opposite of plays, because you still have to be loud but you don’t have to be as loud.”

The siblings break the professor out of robot jail in exchange for his fixing their time machine, but what Von Schwartz doesn’t tell them is that he sets it to take them back to the 1960s. 

“The kids and everybody end up thinking this is groovy,” Barrow said. “They’re all dancing and having fun and then at the end you see the shot of the mom and the professor.”

The goal of the class is to cover most of the aspects of film production, from scriptwriting and camera operation to finance and acting.

“I learned how to use a little videography [and] the camera,” Zapf-Kent said. “I will definitely do more acting, I like it. I see myself doing comedies or drama, maybe both because I love comedy. I did comedy a little while ago, and it was so fun.”

“This is just like a real-life film studio where you have to focus on what you’re doing, because on the set, time is money,” Monet said to the students while filming.

“We’re doing the editing of the video only because you have to have special software and equipment,” Monet said. “Outside of that, the kids are shooting the video, the kids wrote it, directed it, acted it. They had to come up with the production budget and were asked budgeting questions such as, ‘How much is it going to cost for the producer? How much is it going to cost to market? … They were given Monopoly money for that part and they voted on the roles they play.”

After the film is completed, the students will get a link to the final product on Monet’s website, where Monet offers other training courses such as email marketing. Each student will also get their own television channel on the website for their parents to share.

“There’s no third-party content, no attached content, like when you go to YouTube, and you get done seeing a video, than it suggests other [videos] for you to watch,” Monet said. “None of that happens on NewVibe. You stay within the platform and there’s no advertisements, so there’s no pitching kids anything … If the parents want to post [‘Time Rescue’] on Facebook for the whole public to see them, they can post the link to go to that specific video [and] it just takes them to that child’s channel, but there’s no interaction with whomever they send it to.”

Barrow taught the SCS students in the afternoons on Mondays and Tuesdays before returning to traveling for his YouTube channel.

“I sold my house in northeast Oregon [and] at the time, the housing market was insane,” Barrow said. “So I thought, ‘What do I want to do?’ I could have a YouTube channel. I could build it up, get monetized and essentially get paid to travel, which is what I’ve done.”

Barrow added that his goal is to share his knowledge with the children and to see what they in turn create.

“Kids today need to be exposed to the video industry,” Monet said in a press release. “It’s where many of them will find jobs later in life. Video stimulates their creative juices, and our kids today are wired for technology.”