At just 18 years old, filmmaker Jarom Beardall may be at the beginning of his career, but he’s already shooting for cinema’s highest honor.

The Cody man is hoping to win an Oscar with his short film “The Light that Remains.”

“That’s been a big dream of mine since I was a little kid,” Beardall said. “I think the film came together exactly how I hoped. I’m kind of like a person that wants everything to be perfect, and nothing is perfect, so I’ve got to live with what I have and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.”

Beardall became interested in filmmaking during high school and has been developing his craft for about four years. He started as a sports videographer before eventually transitioning to filmmaking. During his senior year he won an Emmy in the National Student Production Awards for the short film, “Fragmentary.” 

Last fall he began college at Valley City State University in North Dakota, where he had signed to play football. But an injury sidelined him and he decided it wasn’t where he wanted to be. 

“It wasn’t really what I was wanting to do,” he said. “So I dropped out, and on the drive back, I started to think of these ideas for a film.”

Beardall had always wanted to make a space movie and by the end of his roughly nine-hour drive home he had the basic idea for a film. He started experimenting with CGI as he didn’t have much experience working with that type of imagery.

“I was just learning along the way and learning CGI led to getting the original idea for the script,” he said.

In the film a coronal mass ejection — massive, explosive burst of solar plasma and magnetic fields launched from the sun’s corona into space — poses a threat to the earth’s atmosphere. A man named Julian is selected to go on a space mission to test the atmosphere.

“Through this film it goes through him battling through grief for his dead wife, and pushing through to go on this mission and complete the mission,” Beardall said.

He started with the script last November and finished it near the end of the year. Filming began in February. The crew was mainly made up of high school media students and because of their various commitments, they were able to film about one scene a month.

“The whole process of making it and finishing it was around six months,” Beardall said. “I want to say thank you to all the crew. We had a great crew that really helped make this movie. I couldn’t have done it without them. Filmmaking is not a one-person job, it’s really a team effort, and to have friends and people in the community that are really excited about what I’m creating is really nice.”

Filming took place around Cody at the Park County Public Library as well as Cody Regional Health. The launch scene was shot at the Greybull Airport. Using borrowed equipment and having friends, as well as himself, act in the film kept costs down and Beardall said he spent about $150.

His former media teacher Betsy Kennedy-Ryzewicz produced the film and also has a small acting role. 

“I texted her when I was dropping out of college, and I said I wanted to focus on film, and asked her if she was supportive of that, and she was completely 100% supportive,” he said. “She was the one who provided the camera for the film, and she was great the entire time.”

He said the most challenging part was making a spacesuit out of EVA foam, as well as building the entire inside of the cockpit for the space scenes.

“That took about a month or two, just building the set and the spacesuit,” he said. “I think the second hardest thing was the CGI, because it took about six hours to render CGI for about a three second clip, so that was very time consuming, and being a new CGI artist, it was a little bit challenging.”

There was a premiere for the film in early June at Big Horn Cinemas. Beardall said owner Tony Beaverson has always been supportive of student filmmakers and he credits him and his team for helping bring the night together.

“It was really cool to see something that I made make other people’s days better, and to see other people enjoy it,” he said. “When I was a kid, I really loved going to the cinema, and I know a lot of people have the same experience, so it was amazing just to be able to create something of that caliber for people to experience and feel emotion in the theater that you can’t get anywhere else.”

The film has been well received, with a 9.2 out of 10 on IMDB, and several reviews on the film tracker app Letterboxd. 

“We’ve got a ton of five stars, a ton of four stars, a couple  three and a half stars, but mostly four and five stars,” Beardall said. “So it’s really cool to see that everybody likes it, not just in this community, but people all around the world are loving it.”

Beardall has submitted “The Light that Remains” to nine Oscar-qualifying film festivals. Films selected to a festival must win an award to be eligible for an Oscar nomination.  

“So they just go on throughout the year and I’ll be waiting to get accepted and to see what happens with that,” he said.

While he waits, he’s also working on additional scripts for potential future projects. 

“Filmmaking is all about making new projects right after you just made something,” he said. “You can’t just make one film and be satisfied with it. You have to keep creating stuff, because that’s how the business is.”

“The Light that Remains” is currently available to view on YouTube  at youtube.com/watch?v=e00xjht4LnM. It will eventually be on Apple TV, Amazon, Plex and other free streaming services.