STATUS: IN PRODUCTION
GENRE: drama
THE PITCH: TBA
TAGLINE: When you lose everything and have nothing else to live for, family is everything.
LOGLINE: When a tragedy causes John to lose everyone he loves in life, he reconnects with his long lost son Sterling, who has also recently experienced major losses.
TONE: A serious drama.
NOTES:
A full short story, hopefully with an edited LOCAL festival runtime of around 18 minutes.
A minimalist story but includes a few flashbacks to add variety to the one main café location. Two lead cast members, three featured cast. Three or four crew members. A five day shoot total, spread out in March (2 days for café scenes), April, May, and August.
This is ostensibly a co-production with Henry Carter/Enterprise Eight Productions. Henry improvised a three page monologue, which is prevalent in Enterprise Eight projects, and Henry also elaborated on his character with only the story-plot points guiding him.
This started out as an EXPERIMENTAL film project. Originally, it was 50% improvised; almost everything inside the café was going to be ad-libbed with simple directions on what the scene was about and how it led into the next scene while the actors 99% developed the characters themselves. While an intriguing prospect, and an opportunity some actors relish, the shoestring-budget and reality of the busy lives of almost all the actors did not allow the needed time, energy, or motivation to go the improvisational route and put so much effort into a project of this small scale. The process was 'daunting' to some and out right unwanted by others ('just give me a script with dialogue and i'll embody that character' was the general consensus from other prospective cast members. So the experimental improvisational aspect was dropped, Shannon wrote out a script with traditional dialogue - incorporating what Henry Carter had already improvised, and the project picked up steam very quickly with several actors interested in the role.
The local Central Texas festival version will be 25 to 50% shorter than the full length short film, a 'cut your darlings' smorgasbord that is more plot-heavy, sacrificing some character development for the sake of pacing/run time. While there will be no director's cut per se, the director's preference would ideally be an edit somewhere between the festival and full-breadth of the short film, But the online/streaming version will be the uncut edit.
SPOILERS: Henry Carter's first opportunity to play a fleshed out villain - although when not simply insane, the best "bad guys" in film believe what they are doing is justified, so this "broken" character is allowed to explore his humanity albeit coming to an immoral and distorted conclusion. Throughout his career, this is only the second time he has played a character this.. dubious; although the first time, "Left" (2015) by Troy Shaw, it was more of a shocking twist than an elaborate full-fledged antagonist character.
Originally the café scenes were to be filmed on Sunday, March 2nd. However the lead actor caught pneumonia, and due to his advanced age, the doctor ordered him to play it safe for two weeks - by which time the co-lead and crew had plans for spring break. Thus the new filming dates had to be rescheduled to the end of March - which allowed more time for actors to learn the script, and the erratic Texas weather (90 degrees one day, below freezing the next night, etc) to calm down before the arrival of April showers. Fortunately the entire cast is available for the new schedule.
THE MAKING OF....
Deja vu: Insanely Sane & Timespawning. Just greenlight it without thinking it through! Shannon had an IDEA. Everyone immediately jumped on board that idea and pre-production became unofficially underway in November 2024 even without a script or locked detailed outline. The Texas winter was harsh so we chose not to film until end of February. However, the original co-lead ghosted us. We thought it was simply the Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday season hustle & bustle, but then, we continued to not hear anything from him with the filming date approaching fast. We secured a new co-lead, and in order to give him more time to memorize the newly-written script (in lieu of improvising, which was a huge factor with the previous actor's decisions), we delayed the filming for a couple weeks. But then, Henry got pneumonia and his doctor demanded he take it easy for a couple weeks (despite Henry "feeling" better within 2 days of taking the medicine.) With other cast and crew already having plans for spring break, we delayed filming until March 30th.
The story will be filmed in three parts with the main actors: part one, which was 77% of the script, was filmed on March 30th and 31st at the Axtell BBQ café; part two, which is 4% of the script, to be filmed a couple weeks later at Henry Carter's house (Drug Dealer scene, Int. John's home scenes, and some green screen shots with Henry); part three, another 4% of the script with very little dialogue for Henry, to be filmed a month later with the Charlotte actor. Since day two and three are flashbacks there is no worry about continuity issues on the actors appearance.
Finally in late July, one final day will be filmed with the other actors who are portraying a young-John and Sterling's grandfather when he was younger.
While the flashbacks with Charlotte and young-John could be explained away with one or two lines of dialogue, THIS IS A MOVIE!!!! Show, don't tell!! It is better to dramatize events than have people just sitting around talking about them - which is already plentiful as it is. There's minimalist filmmaking and then there's just "why are we even making this a short film when we're just TALKING about everything instead of showing it?"
WHAT DID WE LEARN ON THE SHOW TONIGHT, CRAIG?
Even though Shannon Shaw now refuses to make his movies "just to make a movie" just because he CAN, having instead preferring to make stories that showcase his signature style of filmmaking and utilizing the limited time & resources available to him, this particular minimalist story proved to have far too much potential to pass up, and relatively inexpensive, coming in at a {currently} $5,799 budget. But this will be the final short film done in this particular minimalist style. All future projects will have more of a traditional movie structure - running time depends on the story itself, not the outdated traditional demands of the expected running time of a "feature" or "short" - no compulsory cuts or padding.
One of the tasks of a director is to not only stay positive, energetic, and motivate the cast & crew, but to respect the delegation of responsibilities. Allow others to do their job and, even when they insist on complete transparency, you focus on YOUR job and DO NOT even HINT that there are problems that are being tackled.
The director ran into TWO seemingly HUGE hurdles that were eventually overcome; however, when cast members asked, they were informed of the problems, which unnecessarily stressed them out - and most likely gave them momentary pause on the director's competency. In the end, it all worked out, but Shannon felt horrible for even allowing any cast members to know that there were two major problems that were being handled.When using two camera setup, have two crew members! One person per camera. We had to do a pickup shot on day two due to one shot inexplicably being out of focus when that camera was not manned properly.
Using a fogger does not bode well for scenes that are more than 3 minutes long!! By the end of that shot, the smoke has dissipated so much that it is jarring when there is again a LOT of smoke at the start of the next shot.
On a related (fogger) note. The IDEA/HOPE was to mimic Steven Spielberg's dinner scene in "Jurassic Park" to bring some much needed visual style to this mostly-"two heads talking" story. Unfortunately, there was no testing and the bright spotlight beams were not bright enough to cut through the smoke as we had hoped. On the next production, we will definitely have legit actual SPOTLIGHTS to do the job. And to keep the actors' faces clear, most of the smoke will be in the background more while still allowing RAYS of light to beam past them.
While aspiring to be as realistic and detail-oriented as early Christopher Nolan, and the director's OCD, CONTINUITY is a major concern. The long-takes wrecked havoc with the consistent volume of smoke. But more to the point, especially when filming scenes out of order, little things like the placement of cups on a table gives the director pause! Hopefully future productions will have a story editor on set with camera, having easy access to before/after photos of the scene to ensure proper continuity with props, etc.
CAST
HENRY CARTER as "JOHN"
MATTHEW SPARK as "STERLING"
"CHARLOTTE"
CHLOÉ COLLEEN as "KAREN"
MONDO LOPEZ as "DEALER"
CAST & CREW
THE LOOK THAT INSPIRED OUR SCENES
THE LESS-THAN VISUALLY STUNNING END RESULTS
EARLY AI-GENERATED CONCEPT TEASER POSTER
