Five cool things about Stark County filmmaker Adam Deierling and 'Other Side of Darkness'

• 2004 Jackson High School graduate Adam Deierling wrote and directed the feature film, "The Other Side of Darkness."
• The movie had a budget of $15,000, relying on the free use of properties for filming and Deierling's own money.
• "The Other Side of Darkness" was filmed in Steubenville and West Virginia, as well as in Stark County and the Norton area.

Adam Deierling leaned out the window with a video camera as the vehicle he was riding in motored down Route 7 along the Ohio River.

Filming a scene in " The Other Side of Darkness ," the 33-year-old Stark County native was living his dream of making his first feature film.

But he didn't bask in the romanticism of creating cinema. There wasn't time.

"I was more worried about the camera falling on the road than anything else at that particular moment," the 2004 Jackson High School graduate said.

"I probably shouldn't have done it, but any of the shots that you see us going down the road or the freeway, typically that's me hanging out the window of the car, going down the road filming at 55 miles per hour, which isn't the safest or most recommended thing," Deierling said of the filming in 2020.

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Risking his own safety for the sake of the movie is among the many sacrifices Deierling has made in order to get " The Other Side of Darkness " in front of viewers. He wrote and directed the film.

The efforts have paid off. Released on streaming platforms Amazon Prime Video and Tubi, the 120-minute independent film has garnered more than 2 million views on YouTube alone since its July release on that platform, an impressive feat considering a meager production budget of roughly $15,000.

A project of Saturn Entertainment Studios and Villagers Pictures, the movie is also available for purchase as a Blu-Ray and DVD at https://www.othersideofdarkness.com/ .

"It's pretty cool to think there are people out there, and I have no idea who they are, all over the world, watching the movie," said Deierling, who learned about the art of filmmaking while completing an intensive 12-month program at The Los Angeles Film School .

"With the resources we had available to us, I think we could have done much worse," he said of the movie. "But certainly there's room to grow, and that's part of the experience. You're always learning new things."

Deierling's next film is in the early stages.

"I'm currently writing right now," he said of the script. "It's going to be different; it's not going to be the same type of film. We're going to take what we learned from this one."

Here are five other things you should know about Deierling and his action-adventure movie:

1. Adam Deierling made a feature film for $15,000.

"A lot of it has to do with getting favors from people letting you on their property to film, getting cast and crew for reasonable amounts of money, and one of the biggest things is all of the equipment, because I do video production for weddings for a day job," Deierling said. "I pretty much had all of the equipment to go and make a movie."

"We didn't have a lot of money, but we both enjoy making movies, and … we didn't want money to stop us from doing it," he said.

"I dealt with what I had. Between me and my producing partner ( Vinny Sisson ), we had everything we needed to go do it. ... We weren't paying ourselves to do this. It was coming out of my pocket."

2. Guerrilla filmmaking is part of the fun.

"There was one day we were shooting on a gravel road and it was a public road (but) ... one of the ladies who lived on the street didn't particularly think it was a public road, so she called the police on us and she yelled down the street that she was doing it. We just needed to finish one shot and left."

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Scenes also were filmed in a tunnel near a power plant along the Ohio River.

"There were some trucks that didn't like us slowing down in their lane, but they got over it. We just went down the road. We had two vehicles. I was in the producer's car and (actors) were in the Jeep, and we had cellphones to tell them what to do ... and we were in the left lane and they were in the right lane, and I ... filmed it."

3. Film was shot in Steubenville, West Virginia and Stark County.

"That's one of the things we wanted to do, showcase a lot of the wonderful resources we have in our own state that we tend to take for granted. ... The opening scene was shot on my street in (Jackson Township), but primarily a lot of the movie takes place away from the city, so we went to film a good portion of it, 10 or 12 days, in the Norton area ... and one of our actors had a property they let us use."

"We went down to Steubenville ... to get a lot of the hills and freeways down by the river. ... Because of our budget level, we were forced to keep the action (scenes) to a minimum ... and it actually pushed us to do more of a personal story with the characters and stuff, which we would have wanted to do anyway."

Filming also took place in East Liverpool and Nelson Ledges Quarry Park in Garrettsville.

"People were excited to be part of it," Deierling said of filming locations. "You wouldn't get that in LA; everybody wants a couple of bucks or you need to get a permit and all that stuff. You could never make an indie film like this in LA − not for this budget."

4. 'The Other Side of Darkness' is about mass blackouts and a 16-year-old girl's mysterious birthday gift.

The movie stars Maggie Callahan, a Cleveland native and former collegiate soccer player who received a degree in theatre arts from Case Western Reserve University.

Set against the backdrop of the country's largest electrical blackouts, a teen girl named Taylor Jo receives a mysterious birthday gift that leads her "on an adventurous collision course towards a plot to dismantle America's power grid," the movie's synopsis reads.

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Deierling said the film appeals to viewers who are "looking for something a little different, (and) if you want to watch something that's got a more personal story, something that might intrigue you with the drama of the situation and what the characters have to go through."

5. Adam reads both the positive and negative reviews.

"It's always difficult to hear people being nasty ... about their comments and things. A lot of times, the way I look at it, people tell you don't read the stuff ... but I like to read the positive or negative (comments) because, often times, there might be something in those negative reviews where I go, 'You're right ... I probably should have done something different,' (and) ... I'll grow from it, I'll learn from it, and other times, I think, 'This guy is really nuts,' and I'm not going to worry about what he says."

"That's one thing I think is important, especially for young people (who want to make films)," Deierling said. "What makes you stand out is whether you can own up to your mistakes and learn from them, or you're just going to keep making them."

Reach Ed at 330-580-8315 and ebalint@gannett.com . On Twitter @ebalintREP .