This short story kept bouncing back and forth between a short film and an extended short story..
Originally, the entirety of act 2 consisted of Sylvia and Cameron encountering a homeless teenager who was in a pickle, and helping him out of the situation,
However, this 'subplot' was deemed unnecessary to the main plot and character development. And as any first-year student writer knows - or anyone who has studied EARLY James Cameron writing (pre-Avatar), IF YOU CAN CUT OUT SOMETHING WITHOUT IT BEING MISSED, it NEEDS to be cut, no mater the cool reasons or it being there in the first place!
Thus, the focus was now on the main characters only.
Since this was a simple story, the majority of pre-production was spent on personal fund-raising with no outside assistance, and making the STORY & CHARACTERS as good as possible - the goal being always elevating the quality to a better & better level than the previous film project!
For the longest (waste of ) time, a searching for local Texas talent was underway trying to find the perfect actor to portray the LITTLE BROTHER of the protagonist - basically a co-star. However, the GUIDELINES of who the character should be like, was so exact, NO ONE in Texas could reach those goals. It was decided to, instead of casting a professional actor SIMILAR to the inspiration, why not cast the UNSPIRATION himself!? Sure a non-trained, non-professional actor would create certain difficulties. but with competent DIRECTION, even this inexperienced performer who the character was inspired by could provide the desired MATIRA: performance!
The majority of pre-production was indeed spent on perfecting the script! Since minimalist, shoestring-budget films live & die on the realistic, natural PERFORMANCES of the actors, THAT was the focus of this production, with only a couple high-quality CGI shots to aide in the story-telling! The HUMAN, HEART & SOUL, the CHARACTERS, should be the selling point of this short film, not anything else! #NoPressure
