STATUS: IN PRE-PRODUCTION

GENRE: drama

THE PITCH: TBA

TAGLINE: When you lose everything and have nothing else to live for, family is everything.

LOGLINE: After shared tragedies, John reunites with his estranged son Sterling.

TONE: A serious drama.

NOTES:

  • A full short story, hopefully with an edited festival runtime of around 18 minutes.

  • A minimalist story but expanded to include as many flashbacks as possible to add variety to the one main café location. Two lead cast members, three featured cast. Three crew members. A five day shoot total.

  • 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.

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} $5,920 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.

CAST
HENRY CARTER as "JOHN"
MATTHEW SPARK as "STERLING"
"CHARLOTTE"
CHLOÉ COLLEEN as "KAREN"
MANDO LOPEZ as "DEALER"

GAZING INTO THE ABYSS

EARLY AI-GENERATED CONCEPT TEASER POSTER