Nicholas Thurkettle

Wherein a Low Budget Filmmaker Had Better Look Beyond the Obvious Numbers

If you are fortunate enough to have any kind of festival run with a film you have made, there are two questions you can bet money on receiving at a Q&A before your run is over. 1) “What did you shoot on?” and 2) “What was your budget?”

The answer to the first question is readily at-hand. But I have found the second to be frustratingly non-simple; and I’ve learned something by exploring what vexes me about it.

Is your “budget” solely the amount of money which came out of yours and your investors’ pockets in order to make what appears on the screen? Do you include marketing expenses like creating a website and printing posters and postcards? What about buying snacks for a cast and crew screening party? What about festival submission fees? Festival travel costs? If you are planning this properly, you certainly need to plan ahead for those, but are they part of your “filmmaking” budget? Or is marketing and distribution – at least for the purposes of answering that audience member’s question – a separate number?

This is not a problem unique to filmmakers at my level. It infects even the highest levels of Hollywood studios, where we are accustomed to articles describing the nine-figure production budgets of blockbuster films while yada-yada-ing the worldwide marketing and distribution costs, which are often in the same ballpark as the price of making the movie, effectively doubling its “cost”. Simple inertia keeps the journalistic focus on what it costs to “make” the movie, even though, for filmmakers trying to build a career for themselves in this new unmoored independent landscape, unpacking and defining the costs of marketing and releasing their films is becoming essential for survival.

Interesting (to me) side note – the unit cost of a “blockbuster” has demonstrated remarkable stability in recent years. In 2009, we had a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, a Harry Potter sequel, a Terminator sequel, and Avatar sitting at the high end of expense – all with reported production budgets ranging from $200-250 million apiece. A decade later, not even factoring in inflation, that’s still what you can tend to expect from a non-Avengers Marvel superhero movie or a Star Wars episode (other than Solo, which ran way over from having to essentially re-start production.) Hollywood is demonstrating remarkable efficiency at creating more and more bedazzling VFX spectacles at a predictable cost.

But let’s come back down from nine figures to where I live – three and four figures. It often sent an impressed buzz going through a film festival audience when I shared that I spent a total of $783 making The Dinner Scene. And that does match the amount I had outlayed by the time we had a finished, screenable film – I tracked every purchase and payment in a spreadsheet.

It didn’t, though, include what I described above – dozens of festival submissions, travel to festivals in many different states, posters, even the little things like driving to the post office and shipping a Blu Ray disc or thumb drive somewhere. By the time all that is factored in, over the course of two years I have probably shelled out $4-5,000 because of my “$783” film.

And there’s something even more important that number doesn’t reflect, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

So there’s a way of looking at the number which shows it to be fudged, but I think fudged in a way that is relatively traditional among filmmakers. In a way, it’s kind of a mutually-agreeable fib between filmmaker and audience – we make the dream seem more achievable, and our achievement more ingenious, the smaller a number we report. I take a greater sense of responsibility from that, though, to volunteer the bigger numbers if I am talking with anyone who has a serious intent to start down this road. They deserve to know.

In the last couple of years I have been able to demonstrate a success at getting things done for a very small price, even among the community of people making short films for festivals. Shorts I made for $700-800 would get programmed alongside works with budgets of $20,000, $30,000, or more. Because of that, I was blessed to have people close to me willing to begin investing in larger productions.

When asked the budget of “R&R”, I usually answer “$3,000”, and that’s relatively accurate by the above standard. But there’s no miracle hiding behind my thrifty ways – a lot of it comes from the volunteer energy of my collaborators, and daring to bypass costs that traditionally mitigate risk at higher budget levels. I haven’t registered an LLC for a short film. I’ve deferred pay when working with SAG-AFTRA performers. I’ve finagled free gear, skipped getting production insurance…I could have easily bankrupted myself from stupidity had one accident happened.

I put myself through the exercise of calculating what “R&R” would have cost had we made the same movie the more “professional” way – paying everyone a commensurate rate for their skilled labor, getting traditional insurance, true rental fees for all the gear we used, hotel rooms for cast and crew instead of us all squeezing onto couches and yoga mats to sleep at the cabin where we were filming.

Once I crunched all that, I realized that the same movie which I describe as costing $3,000 could have cost $15-20,000 without altering anything an audience sees.

How do you categorize those phantom dollars separating the two figures? How do you factor them into your understanding of what it costs to make a movie?

My anxiety about the success of “R&R” out there on the festival circuit is admittedly amplified by the fact that people close to me put their own money on the line to bring it to life. While considering this gap in “budget” numbers, though, a realization crystallized which I think I already sensed, subliminally, but which I became determined to hold on to as it now expressed itself:

Every person who works on a movie for less than a professional rate IS an investor in that movie.

Right? If their hours of expert labor are worth $500 and I compensate them with $100 worth of gas money and food, that $400 isn’t imaginary. By surrendering it, they have invested as much in my movie as an outsider writing me a $400 check did. Sure, I cut a few corners, but I didn’t get from $15-20,000 down to $3,000 with my own ingenuity and daring. It’s because of the people who provided labor, energy, artistry, and valuable equipment and supplies for less than their true value.

Is this a merely rhetorical consideration? A quibble over numbers that never took the form of real currency? I can’t stop you thinking that way. But how would it change the way you ran your set if you thought of every person around you as an investor? Would you treat them with greater respect and care? Would you feel a greater responsibility to plan and organize so that they knew how valued their time was? Would you work to keep them in the loop throughout the life of the project, knowing that they had “bought in” to every achievement it racks up out there in the world?

I send updates to every person who worked on my shorts. I include pictures and stories from festivals. If there’s a screening they might be able to get to, I send them everything they need to know in order to get there and/or invite their friends. Not everyone responds, but I’d rather show I care more than they need me to. Conversely, I’ve acted for cut rates in feature films where a year or more can pass after I wrap and leave the set without my hearing a sniff of news.

I have been remarkably fortunate in the talent and energy level of the people who have worked on multiple films with me; but I do believe you get more fortunate in such matters when you cultivate an attitude like this. I believe you get more fortunate when you consider in advance how to create the best experience available within your means. As we were driving down out of the mountains after wrapping “R&R”, I joked-but-not-really-a-joke that the 44 hours we had spent up there constituted just about the perfect span of time for the moviemaking sprint we had to undertake; and if we had stayed up there for one more day, we might not have been able to keep it positive no matter how much we liked each other. That was as much a gamble to me as the lack of insurance – asking how far one can ask people you’re not paying to push themselves. And I think, in that area, we came close to finding the limits of our “budget”.

To put it in the starkest terms – my credit card is not going to allow me to pretend that festival travel costs don’t count, and my credibility (not to mention my circle of friends) is not going to allow me to disregard a finite budget of donated labor. All those costs are floating out there, in the future of films already made or not even made yet. “R&R” was finished in January of 2018 but, just last night, I spent another $75 on it, making a new DCP plus backup for upcoming festival screenings. That’s not a dollar amount I can afford to casually light on fire.

No matter that it might take some of the magic out of the astoundingly teensy numbers we consider “the budget”, if I am going to advance my career I have to recognize and prepare for these costs now; just as I have to recognize and prepare for the “cost” of all the favors which will once again bless me as yet another tiny, tiny budgeted project of mine comes to life and gets out into the world.

I am entering into knuckled-down pre-production on a new short that we intend to shoot in March. The name of it is “Three Ninety Five”, and as some Californians might wonder, there is a connection to the 395 highway which runs through the Eastern Sierras.

This means that an increasing amount of my mental bandwidth is occupied by questions – ranging from practical (where is there a good concentration of vintage/thrift stores where we can go on a prop/costume shopping expedition?), to the far more abstract (why are we even calling it a film when there is no stage of the process where photochemical film will be involved?)

This project arose out of a ground rule of mine, and a practical reality I was up against. The ground rule is to make sure that there’s something important to do in each project that I’ve never done before, and which terrifies me. And the practical reality is that, with my education being in theater, I have in my filmmaking work heavily relied on the technical knowledge of my collaborators, to the extent of working with the same cinematographer on my last five projects. While it is one of my pillars of makin’ stuff wisdom that you should forge alliances with people who are good at the things you are bad at, I could not count on such an arrangement going on indefinitely, especially at my budget level. So “Three Ninety Five” is, from concept to production scenario on up, designed to force me to act as my own cinematographer for the first time, and do it for a project that is going to DEPEND on visual artistry to succeed.

This means immersing myself deeper than I ever have in questions of camera, lens choice, lighting, image resolution, coloring LUTs, and so much more. It means paying way, way more attention to what gear other filmmakers are using and what motivates their choices. I can’t say I’ll be an pro when this is done but from sheer, adrenalized cramming I am definitely going to learn a thing or eight.

As always, my choices are significantly restricted by my budget, which is larger than my first few shorts but nowhere near what we spent on R&R or Anya (both of which were expensive by my standards but absurdly cheap by most others’.) But it’s cheaper than ever to get not just big-screen quality, but more than you could possibly need. What do I mean by that, exactly?

There’s a lot of talk in the business now about 4K. There was a rush to adopt it as a universal standard but, at least from where I’m standing, I think a lot of people have successfully questioned the necessity of that. This terrific article from IndieWire breaks down the cameras, lens packages, and image resolutions of the features playing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I go into such an article presuming, with good reason, that the directors and cinematographers quoted know way, way, way more about this than I do. And, while the chief takeaway from the article is that the Arri Alexa Mini is cornering the indie feature market, another takeaway is that many of these filmmakers are opting not to even originate their footage in 4K.

There are way more reasons for that than I know, but I can tell you already that the choice undoubtedly saves money and speeds up workflow (speed shortens the road between *spending* money and, hopefully, making money.) 4K footage is chunky stuff and, if you can’t afford to work at a professional editing bay, it might choke off your home computer. And to what end? Several of my shorts were originated in 4K; but we’ve rarely, if ever to my knowledge, screened at that full resolution at any festival. The best screening of R&R we’ve had to date was a 2K ProRes file, and it looked scrumptious when projected. The majority of the festival screenings I’ve participated in projected the 1080p file I keep in my cloud storage; and it’s doubtful the system they were projecting on could have handled more.

I don’t say this to dismiss higher-end quality. I went to The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to watch Lawrence of Arabia (probably still my favorite film of all time) projected in a new 70mm print and I BATHED in that business. I was one of the few people who went to see Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk projected in the format director Ang Lee nicknamed “The Whole Shebang” – 120 frames-per-second, 4K footage in 3D. His The Life of Pi remains one of the most bewitching uses of 3D since Avatar made it hip. And Billy Lynn in that format was a staggering, visceral experience, but that’s a double-edged sword because it raises the question we rarely ask but which underpins everything – what we go to the movies to experience?

This recent article from Popular Mechanics pinged my radar, describing the history of the mostly-forgotten 1980’s sci-fi feature Brainstorm, directed by the pioneering, legendary, not-enough-superlatives Douglas Trumbull. The film concerned characters entering what we would now call Virtual Reality; and to depict the switch, Trumbull experimented with using different film stocks and frame rates. After intensive research and study into the effect of visual stimulus on human brains and nervous systems, he created a process he called Showscan, consisting of 70mm film captured at 60fps, compared with the cinematic standard of 35mm film at 24fps.

“I’ve ridden on roller coasters in real life, and I rode the roller coaster in Showscan,” he (screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin) says. “The memory locked in by the viewing of Showscan was stronger than the memory of actually going on a roller coaster. It registers in a very deep, impactful way.”

This parallels my experience watching Billy Lynn – during a flashback to a fatal military encounter, someone getting shot didn’t feel like a spectacular Hollywood effect, it felt like I had witnessed a murder. It was less glossy, less artful, but registered deep in my brain somewhere outside the usual space that movies land in. That makes for a powerful tool, which means there’s an equally-powerful responsibility to ask – sure, we CAN do this, but why spring that on people who just want to sit in the dark and be taken away by a story for awhile?

How perfect is too perfect? And is imperfection necessary or just something we’re used to? As a measurement of the depths of my nerdhood, I’ve been tracking the progress of Project 4K77 – one of multiple fan efforts to create a projectable, UHD version of the “unaltered” original Star Wars based on a hodgepodge of sources; effectively undoing everything Lucasfilm has done in the creation of various Special Editions over the years. As a ride-or-die Han-shot-first-er, I respect the effort.

We now have a generation come of age for whom digital media and digital filmmaking tools have simply always been in the toolbox. And it’s fascinating to watch as, in going back into film history to do this project justice, the Project 4K77 team has had to re-learn and explain for their followers just how “messy” the entire analog filmmaking process was for the first century-ish of the art form.

They have catalogued the four different film stocks used to shoot the original film, researched the ad hoc solutions the Star Wars crew came up with day after day shooting in a hostile desert, tracked how the multiple generations of optical printing for effects would have altered the color and grain level from shot to shot. What we would now consider a distracting inconsistency was so unavoidable that no one at the time would think to demand better.

And – what was sort of an obvious fact then which was beneath consideration but which shows just how different filmmaking has become – they have outlined for observers how, due to the photochemical bath used to produce prints, there would be minute differences between every single film print of Star Wars ever made.

All of this taken together means that there is no end of the rainbow in the search for the “real” Star Wars. At some point, you just have to stop and agree that it’s as real as life allows. And that, just like how your Machu Picchu experience may vary depending on what month or time of day you visit Machu Picchu, there are some variables you will simply never be able to wrangle in making the experience of an artistic work universally repeatable and universally consistent from person to person.

As much as people may have roasted Lucas for claiming that the Special Edition represented things he always wanted to do but couldn’t with 1977 technology; for certain things, he was right. A microbudget indie film has better tools available now than he ever did for consistent coloring and grain, and anyone of professional seriousness uses them. It’s just become automatic.

And while we’re talking about grain, the current version of Project 4K77 has been split into two parts, one with as “clean” an image as could be produced using the latest in DNR (Digital Noise Reduction) tools, the other without said tools. And that’s because for some people, a movie without grain looks “wrong”, and Star Wars without grain looks especially wrong. But younger viewers raised on a diet of “cleaner” imagery don’t see a problem at all.

Film grain was an inevitable outcome of the process at the time. Doing without it was, for decades, not even really an option. So we owe it to ourselves to ask: does that sense of “texture” actually positively contribute to the experience of watching the film? Or is it, at this point, a nostalgic trigger programmed by however many thousands of movies we have watched in our lives? I know that I “like” the 24fps experience of watching a movie over the 30fps that was the TV/Video standard for a long time; as a crowdsourced audience standard it was a definite improvement over the 18fps that often came from silent film. But did the progress actually peak there? Was further experimentation just too expensive and exhausting? Or were the results, like that Whole Shebang, so intense to the senses that it took the experience past positive? What do we go to movies for?

Going further down the rabbit hole – say you like the sound of this Project 4K77 file, and you download it. Well, how are you going to watch it? Are you going to strike a 35mm print from it and run it on a vintage projector? Or are you going to watch it on a UHD digital television? Or, hell, your phone? Again, we arrive at the conclusion that there is no singular, virgin-pure Star Wars. The work is aging in a way unique to its medium. But go through a museum and ask yourself how many brushstrokes on a painting are the artist’s, and how many are a restorer’s, and you’ll see this is not a unique problem.

Well, we’ve traveled far on this, haven’t we? It’s going to sound foolhardy, but despite all of these considerations, I’ve made the choice to shoot “Three Ninety Five” in 4K. Whether it’s artistically “necessary” or not, I’ve found a cost-effective camera package rental I can do it with, and knowing that it’s increasingly common at the Hollywood level, I’d like to at least test whether I can manage the workflow from within my present resources. Call it gaining a professional credential.

Will it ever result in any viewer having an aesthetically “better” experience with the film? Honestly, I doubt it – there are so many elements: story, acting, direction, editing, lighting, music, which, if they aren’t up to snuff, resolution isn’t going to mean tiddlywinks.

But I wouldn’t have known to look at it that way last month. I might have let myself walk 100% into membership with the cult of 4K. Last year I acted in a feature film that was shooting at *8*K; so I’m sure not the only one hearing that siren song. I’ll let you know if they ever finish post-production.

I had plenty to dwell on already when it comes to theme, to plotting, to the eternal dance of how much information to provide the audience, how much to withhold. I could spend six professional lifetimes immersing myself in this stuff and still wouldn’t know a “best” way to cinematically render any idea I have. It will always be a combination of resources, conditions, and whatever planning I can manage. But the unifying thoughts that can help us choose from within those restrictions can only come by asking a few big, airy questions once in awhile.

Now – on to that thrift store shopping.

Leading up to the release of “The Dinner Scene” on Seed & Spark, I put a series of posts up on Instagram and my public Facebook page (both @NThurkettle), telling behind-the-scenes stories of the inspiration and execution of the short film. Collecting them now here.

This is where “The Dinner Scene” began – with this close-up of actress Milla Jovovich’s lips in the 1992 film Chaplin, directed by Richard Attenborough with cinematographer Sven Nyquist. I was fascinated by how the choice to isolate on a body part, rather than de-humanizing her, actually focused us on where all the emotion and intention of the moment lived. Not every filmmaker can pull that off, and I started to wonder whether you could actually construct a narrative out of such extreme close-ups, thus creating a protagonist that the audience could invest in, and empathize with, without ever actually seeing them in full. I believe strongly that a movie can’t do all of the “feeling” on behalf of an audience, sometimes your job is to create a vacuum into which the audience pours their own feelings; and I thought, if we could pull off this trick, denying them a full look at the protagonist might trick them into emotionally “leaning forward” a bit. This seemed like an ideal challenge for a short film, where the running time gives you the liberty, if not the obligation, to try something which is possibly crazy. But what story would I tell?

I was out at a bar with a friend when the idea for “The Dinner Scene” leapt to mind; using that scheme of stitching together closeups to plot out an emotional journey to tell the story of a writer at work. I have seen many very good films about writers, but very few which I think capture the process of writing, itself; and the emotional rollercoaster it sends so many sensitive souls on. Given how internal that journey is, it inspired me to consider where we would be able to catch glimpses of it – in the sip of a cup of coffee, a hand hesitating over a pad of paper. This is one case where I was not about to resist the old cliche – “write what you know”.

This is what results when you’re trying to tell a story in a progression of extreme close-ups; you essentially have to edit the movie together in your head before you even shoot it. This spreadsheet described every set-up I thought we needed to tell the story visually, and then organized them by which side of the table the shot would originate from, in order to minimize the time spent moving and re-lighting. We would be shooting, for free, in a coffeeshop that was going to stay open to the public, and had pledged to be out by lunchtime, so for many of these brief shots, we would only get one take. To my astonishment, not only did we make it through the list, some 90% of the shots described in this spreadsheet made it all the way to the final cut of the film!

For the half of “The Dinner Scene” set in the coffeeshop, there were only five of us to execute the shoot – myself, cinematographer J. Van Auken, sound recordist Darren Lodwick, makeup artist Nikki Nina Nguyen, and actress Jenaha McLearn. Due to a miscommunication, we didn’t get access to the cafe until an hour after we had planned, which meant we had to double our hustle to have any hope of making the day. And yet we managed to wrap one whole minute early! Our everlasting gratitude goes to the 102 Cafe in Garden Grove for hosting our production – to this day they are supporting the arts with live music and cool, caffeinated drinks all artists need to survive the California heat!

I usually refer to actress Jenaha McLearn as the unsung hero of “The Dinner Scene”. When I approached her about the role, I talked about how difficult the technical element of it was going to be, how little room for error there would be on the shoot, and that we would never see her full face in the movie. Actors like having their full face visible – it’s good for their careers! Despite that, Jenaha was gung ho about the idea and the challenge and threw herself into it.

She has a lifetime of training in dance, and that turned out to be the perfect asset for what we were doing. Shooting super-tight in shallow focus meant that she had to hit an extremely precise spot in 3-dimensional space, while landing the intention and emotion of the moment. And, given that we were shooting out of order, she had to remember the arc of her character and vary the intensity of each moment accordingly.

Time after time, she nailed gestures on the first take, and when I saw it all assembled, I marveled at the number of little vulnerable, neurotic behavioral touches she was able to slip in. You really get a picture of this writer and her emotional rollercoaster, and as close as we were pushed in on her, we never caught any dishonesty. It’s an outstanding performance, and the short would never have succeeded without it. See more of the full spectrum of her talents and her professional achievements on her website.

The “Cosmic Owl” is an important figure in “The Dinner Scene”, providing unexpected inspiration to our Writer to get over her creative block. It was a multi-dimensional instance of art imitating life, because I myself was in a coffeeshop, stuck trying to figure out how to finish the script, knowing that the couple in the film-within-a-film needed a subject to argue about that would be dramatically juicy, but not knowing what that might be. Frustrated, I leaned back in my chair, bumped my head against a painting hanging on the wall, and, ta-da!, the script seemingly finished itself.

To pay homage to that moment by using a painting in the film, I knew the painting would need to be a mix of beguiling and whimsical, and yet somehow direct in the way it connected with and challenged the writer. “Cosmic Owl” fulfilled these needs splendidly, and was leant to the production by the terrific Southern California artist Heather McMillen. It has been displayed in cafes and galleries around Long Beach and Orange County and is available for purchase!

Due to the availability of actors, we didn’t shoot the “dinner” half of “The Dinner Scene” until two weeks after the filming of the “cafe” half. In the interim, I completed a rough cut of the Writer’s half of the story. Timing being so important in comedy, though, I would have to wait until the other footage was in before I could fine-tune.

In addition to producing/writing/directing/editing, I was also the de facto Art Director on the project, which mostly involved mixing up a fake cappuccino that we could top up whenever needed (cold brew with flat whipped cream and cinammon), as well as fake red wine (mostly cranberry juice and flat cola with a bit of cherry syrup for texture).

You are supposed to avoid having real-world brands appear in your film unless you have obtained permission, but I didn’t want my actors having to worry about keeping the wine bottle facing away from camera, so I Photoshopped a fake label. In an in-joke relating to the Writer’s ongoing self-doubt as she imagines this scene, the pinot noir label translates as “The Sh*tty Writer”.

For the second half of production, we convened at the home of my very good friends, John and Amanda Byrd, in the city of Costa Mesa. Their beautiful backyard covered dining patio already had festive lights strung around it, and I thought it would look great on camera, while the gazebo walls would present some fun framing options.

The challenge, though, was that age and dampness had made the structure fragile, and so we had to ensure that at no time during lighting, blocking, or camera movement, would we actually come into direct contact with it. Thankfully, with such a small crew, everyone was able to stay out of one another’s way and avoid thoughtless bumping.

As the sun went down and we started working through the shot list, a layer of damp air came in off the ocean, threatening to turn into a light drizzle, which would not have been at all healthy for the gear we had lying around. Thankfully, we nailed our last shot and got clear just before the moisture got too heavy. While our cafe shoot wrapped a minute early, our challenging evening in the backyard ran over…by four minutes. With a good plan and a team you trust, crazy things are possible!

MacLeod Andrews is one of the country’s leading audiobook narrators, as well as an outstanding stage and film performer who starred in the cult horror film They Look Like People. He also produced and starred in an upcoming feature-length genre hybrid called A Ghost Waits that I co-produced and have a voice cameo in. I’m lucky I can call him a friend as well as a colleague. He’s got extraordinary range as an actor, but what I think he doesn’t get to show off nearly enough is what a wicked and imaginative sense of humor he has.

To play the role of David in “The Dinner Scene”, MacLeod was constantly riding a line of straight-faced and strange, portraying both the heightened romantic melodrama of their film-within-a-film, but also the weird convulsions of a character whose every word and action is under constant review and revision by its creator. There’s a type of comedy I like to describe as “bluff comedy”, where you’re inexorably ratcheting up the absurdity without ever openly acknowledging it, trying to get the audience to break first. Sculpting MacLeod’s performance in the face of his constant inspiration and invention was one of the greatest pleasures of the whole experience – in one moment that flies by in the finished cut, his ex-girlfriend Pamela throws a handful of salad in his face, and he subtly catches a leaf of spinach and starts gesturing with it. I almost blew the take with laughter when he did that.

I met Holly Bittinger when she auditioned for a Shakespeare company where I served as casting director. The directors there didn’t opt to use her but I thought she had a rare appetite for acting challenges and a great spirit of fun, so I asked her to keep me in the loop on what she was doing. A different Shakespeare company snapped her up almost immediately.

As “Pamela”, Holly matched MacLeod in energy and comic commitment, which I had guessed could happen and hoped for even though the two never met before showing up on set. Making the “get to know you” part of things even loopier was the fact that, schedule-wise, we needed to shoot the bedroom scene first!

I love watching their battle of wills and the way they navigate into the explosion of pent-up passion. And Holly delivers the most unexpected performance curveball in the piece, suddenly giving voice to the Writer’s real despair and self-doubt in a breathless, downward-spiraling rant which Holly navigated in an unbroken take. I love actors with stage experience in their portfolio, because I know that if I set up a shot where we are going to slowly push in on them for over a minute and they have to hit seven different emotional checkpoints and can’t break connection to the moment; they’ll deliver.

“The Dinner Scene” made its festival premiere almost exactly one year ago at the Alameda International Film Festival up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alameda began as the Long Day Short Film Festival, and while their programming has expanded to features, they still have a strong love for shorts – daring shorts, local shorts, international shorts.

Road tripping up from Orange County with me was the film’s makeup artist and one of my dearest friends, Nikki Nina Nguyen. We both absolutely love the travel aspect of film festivals – getting to know and explore a new place, as well as meet the area’s most passionate film lovers. On this trip we got to see our film screened twice, and enjoyed many other fantastic films as well as live music, a memorabilia auction, and a spontaneous evening’s train ride into San Francisco (where we split a plate of gnocchi at Francis Ford Coppola’s restaurant).

In the months after, the film racked up a truly astonishing number of festival plays. I’ve put many, many hours over the last couple of years into studying the festival world in order to develop my submission strategy. When you’re sweating every dollar, you need a clear idea of your goals and your reasoning for each spend; because I was going to be spending more on submission fees than I spent making the movie. I thought that we had a chance of traveling well, given that we were a broadly-appealing comedy that ran under ten minutes (9’57”, to be exact!) That’s very programmable, assuming the movie works. But as the acceptances rolled in – and even a couple of awards(!!!) – it overshot even my most ambitious definition of success. The best moments were when I was able to travel to the festivals, and be there in the crowd when a big joke landed and blew up the room. That’s what every bit of this work was for.

When you watch “The Dinner Scene”, it never flat-out explains its gimmick to you. It’s only by watching the Writer’s scribbling and the cross-cutting between the cafe and the dining porch that you understand the relationship between the two places. Our exceptional cinematographer/colorist, J. Van Auken, underlined the difference by shooting the Writer in natural light with muted colors, while putting Pamela and David in more vivid, saturated colors with intense, “Hollywood” lighting, placing them in a more fantastical world.

Which gave us a very clearly-defined bar to clear. There are jokes throughout the short, especially in the second half, that specifically pay off the audience’s understanding of the “rules” of what they’re watching. If they haven’t been paying attention, and the movie didn’t successfully establish what was happening, there would be no laughter. Thankfully, there was; and as multiple screenings passed I could see the normal trajectory of laughter like a curved line running through the movie. It was a total affirmation that you don’t have to talk down to an audience; that if they’re watching with engaged curiosity, you can take them somewhere they didn’t expect and they’ll be delighted. Making short films has effectively been the film school I never went to, and the opportunity to experiment with storytelling approaches like this was worth every penny.