Learning As I Go: A Directors Journey; They Feel

This was a 48hr challenge for OSIF that I co-directed with Colton. This was the first time working with students not in our original cohort group and it was hands down the best experience I could’ve gotten. You need to work as a team with people you’ve never worked with before and must operate under a big time crunch. 

On Friday we are given 2 genres to randomly choose from, a line, an object, and a character that must be included in it. 

The line was:

“Tomorrow is going to be the best day of your life”

The object was a map.

And the character was Zephyr Kallen, art director.

We drew science fiction as the first and a buddy film for the other. I was ecstatic having written a lot of sci-fi growing up. When writing it I suggested an idea I’ve been working on for a while about 2 brothers living in a van after parasitic aliens have decimated earth's population. I used the van from Beach Bum Tours, where I work wine touring over summer. Mistee had an amazing location set up for us that’s usually a wedding venue. Off we went. I will say it took a bit of getting used to sharing an idea I’ve worked on previously because you always have this vision in your head on how it should look, but I’m happy I got to co-direct because new shot ideas shots get brought up that ultimately make it better than anything you could’ve imagined on your own. 

There’s a match cut at the beginning with the crowbar that I absolutely love. It took a while for me to line up but it was well worth it.

We opted not to have a radio message on the radio but looking back that would have helped explain the story a bit more. It kind of comes off as 2 murderer friends going around killing together… still a buddy film, right?

The cool thing about the 48hr is that you get to step into every role. Everyone helps produce with their connections, I was on camera at points, the audio team doubled as grips, the co director was also the lead actor… it’s pure chaos and I’m here for it. Our rag tag team was slapped together last minute and we had 8 people total. The actual event was hosted in Vernon and I didn’t realize these award screenings are a networking event on its own, I highly recommend attending them to meet people in the industry.