In Retrospect: The making of a sort of bad short film; pt. 1: Pre-Production

"Hey guys, you wanna make a short film?"

"Yeah, sure, that sounds cool."

And that's how we got into it.

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By the way, that movie poster you see—I made it for this post. We never had a real poster. The lack of quality is entirely my fault.

Here's the film:

(This version includes a post-credits scene that wasn't part of the original release.)

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I'd long (?) been sucked into the YouTube vortex of screenwriting and cinematography and video essays. Channels like Nerdwriter and The Closer Look showed up in my recommended section every time.

As such, I wanted to make a great film, and thought I basically knew how.

That was my first mistake.

One friend of mine—Thomas, who studies economics, engages with me in philosophical discourse, and teaches survival to air cadets at a military base in the summer—is an actor. In high school, he was part of an alternative to English class called Actors' Studio.

Another friend, Rian, is a photographer. His hobby is chasing public vehicles and filming them in action for his YouTube channel. He was in a program at school called Arts, Literature, and Communications. He wanted to learn photography stuff, but the government makes you go through this wider program. There's a chance one might never even take a class on what they intend to do. He happened to take filmmaking courses in this program.

If we can, on weekends we three meet to watch movies. We were sitting in Thomas' basement one Saturday—we might've been watching Terminator 2—when I asked whether they wanted to make a short film.

They were both on board.

I walked through the hallway at school one day, and on the wall I saw a poster: "3rd Annual JAC [John Abbott College] Student Film Festival." Good timing.

The first matter was the script. Thomas and I met between classes in a computer lab and talked over ideas. I had a list. Thomas suggested an idea: some guy's life is run by phone alarms, and it turns out his phone is broken, and the alarms are in his head.

Simple enough. Too simple. So we expanded on it. Developed a plot outline. We didn't expand enough, though—more on that later.

I had the most writing experience of the group. I'd read two or three books on fiction-writing, and I'd written more fiction than either of them in the past.

I lay on my bed at home and in one or two sessions wrote the script. I didn't know much about short films, so I gave it something like a three-act structure. I sent the script to Thomas.

He liked it, he said. But some things needed changing.

I changed some things. Radically. I had several versions of the script with entirely different themes. One script I built completely around the goal of using Bing Crosby's Pennies From Heaven in the music.

This brought Thomas into it. He made his own version. He simplified. His was more like the original story. It lacked the attempt at complex themes.

I resisted at first. I wanted something more ambitious. (I should add that my pride came into play—not publicly, but in my head.)

But he was right. We needed something simpler.

Alright then. If this is what we need to win.

His version was by no means perfection, though. For one thing, he'd gotten rid of an entire scene. Structurally, the film made no sense anymore. We added that back in.

He didn't always simplify. He'd added a backstory for the main character, Jack. (He insisted on the name Jack, which he took from Fight Club.) Jack was now a man who arrived late to work on a roof, and his partner fell off the roof because he wasn't there.

Well, I said, that's got to go.

There were problems with individual lines, too. Some lines just plain read bad. Other lines were okay, but I believed my versions of them were better.

Thomas resisted.

Okay, I thought, I'm going above your head.

I had Rian give his opinion.

Late at night—the only time we could—we did a video-conference on Google Hangouts. Rian hadn't really read the script yet, which made things take longer than they should have.

I should mention that we were approaching the time of production. The first scene would be shot soon, if we weren't to run out of time.

We looked for Rian's reactions as he read the script. Then he went into my version and read that.

I looked at my script and Thomas' on two tabs of my laptop in front of me. I breathed and waited for the verdict.

Rian told us what parts of each he liked. He agreed on getting rid of the backstory. Too much for a short film, he said. Our time limit was ten minutes, and we had to keep it under.

Rian picked out the sections of lines he liked from each. Where Thomas and I clashed, Rian usually picked mine, I think—though not when it involved complicating the theme. And in line with that I'd thrown a poem into the dialogue at the climax. I was the only one who liked that, and I'd named my screenplay after it—Invictus. That was cut.

Rian offered one change that neither of us expected. He pointed out that in one scene Jack has a strong worldview based around order and around his alarms, then the other protagonist, April, offers a single line, and Jack says "Maybe you're right."

What's more, I'd realise too late, this is made worse by the line being a cliché: "But isn't the greatest risk in life to take no risks at all?" Cringe. And when Thomas offered that line, all I said was "Alright."

This was a big problem. It made the story ridiculous.

I can't say why we never changed it.

And the bad lines never changed, either. Corrections were stuck in footnotes.

The good thing was that Thomas had managed (or so we were told) to secure Subways as a location, as well as a coffee shop in the basement of our school. He had, we were told, extras and a lead actress in mind.

That wouldn't exactly go as planned.

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DISCLAIMER: This is all from memory. Quotes are approximate. I think I've made the conflict look sharper than it really was. This is an okay representation of inner conflict, but outwardly nobody ever said anything to indicate conflict. Our fights were more like:

"I'm afraid, good sir, that I respectfully disagree. I mean no offense when I say this line is okay, but doesn't sound quite right."

"I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. I think the line best fits Jack's character, since..."

Yeah, pretty much like that.

I'll post a pt 2: Production soon enough.