Pushing Limits

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from this year is that when an opportunity arises, take it. It’s there for a reason, and it’s all the better if it’s challenging and tests your limits.

I had the opportunity to submit a short film for the No Sleep ‘til Film Fest competition hosted by AGBO and judged in part by the Russo brothers. Shreyansh Dixit, a few weeks back, asked Aly Rose and I if we’d be interested in participating in it or at least trying it out. We all decided that it would be a wonderful opportunity for us to get some experience and push our limits.

The premise of the competition is simple: there is a prompt you must follow that releases at 7:30 pm PST on Friday, April 16. All you have to do is follow the prompt to make a short film in 48 hours and submit it by 7:30 pm PST on Sunday, April 18.

Because Shreyansh, Aly, and I have worked together in the past for Shreyansh’s original work project, we were all quite comfortable talking to each other and dedicating ourselves to the full 48 hours this project would require. We created a detailed plan and timeline for how the project would unfold, and this plan went something like this:

Friday:

• Shreyansh arrives at Sarah’s house at 7:30 pm

• Shreyansh and Sarah brainstorm a few storylines and watch some short films for inspiration

• When the prompt releases at 9:30 (central time), Shreyansh and Sarah plan the story and come up with the concept

• Aly arrives back from work at around 11:00 pm and will write the script - this will be finished by 1 or 2 am

Saturday:

• Get to the Museum of American Railroad in Frisco by 8:15 am to film (Aly as actor, Sarah as cinematographer, Shreyansh as director)

• Finish filming in the train yard by noon, eat lunch, and transition to the Frisco Heritage Museum by 12:30 pm

• Wrap filming before 3:30 pm

• Aly leaves for work at 3:45 pm, Shreyansh and Sarah begin editing and finish rough edit by the end of the day

Sunday:

• Complete any reshoots required in the morning hours

• Shreyansh and Sarah finish editing and sound design, then score the film

• Sarah color grades the film

• Submit the film by 9:30 pm

Unfortunately, not everything went as planned. But despite all the challenges, stress, and a lack of sleep, the final product we came up with is something that we could not be more proud of.

The hardest part of the entire process was getting a solid concept down that fit the prompt. The prompt was: “In this challenge, participants are required to take something from our reality and bend it, remove it, twist it, or question it. This can be an item, an idea, or a person. It’s your turn to interrupt and reconfigure our world into something unexpected.” Our immediate first thought was something sci-fi-like, but we had no idea how to do visual effects, so our options were limited.

Fortunately, I mentioned the idea of depersonalization and derealization, and it became our main concept. Someone with depersonalization or any kind of dissociative disorder is constantly questioning their reality, so as long as we showed this in an interesting way, we could make it answer the prompt and still use the museum locations that Aly had worked so hard to attain earlier in the week.

By the time Aly arrived at my house from work, our idea was only half-baked. Aly almost disagreed with the idea, but eventually, she carried the concept and began creating a story out of it. Below is the basic outline of the story that Aly drafted.

SEQUENCE

1. Establishing wide of Anne wiping off the blackboard, erasing, a quote is focused on that is like the centerpiece of the board

   1. “To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.” - William Osler

2. Each wipe shows a different car, first sleeper, then lounge, then modern, we stay in modern

3. Hearing the cries of a baby, Anne gets up frantically to look for a child, husband’s voice in the background pressuring her into having a family, the conductor says “next stop” Anne is real-life wiping off blackboard more intensely, maybe not faster, but firmer

4. Anne looks back and now she is in the lounge car, admires the car more, hears her friends more “live a little”, “get yourself out there!”, “have some fun”, the conductor says “final stop," Anne is real-life wiping off the blackboard faster

5. Anne is now getting up from the sleeper car, very sluggish and comfortable, seeming almost in a trance, “it’s time to settle down”, it is herself talking to her students, she goes and collapses on one of the beds in the car, and takes a deep breath, it is silent now, in real life she stops wiping for a second, but then the conductor says “ma’am its time to get off now”, and she asks “why”, real-life Anne is wiping again and then loses track of the board cleaner and it flies across the room

6. Starts to cycle through her in all of the trains, saying why, the same sequence happening of her with her hands going around her head, going back and forth between her saying “why” normally, and one of her screaming, at the same time the baby cry, the “live a little”, and the “it’s time to get off”

7. Cuts back to real Anne, she seems calmer now, showing some emotion, collected, she goes and picks up the board wiper and puts it back, “why…….” ( something), focuses on the word ideals, then she erases it, and then shows shots of all the trains empty, writes something along the lines of “live in the moment”

As expected, the final product looked very different compared to the outline and even the storyboard we created afterward. Nonetheless, we got everything done by about 5:20 am. Shreyansh and I didn’t feel like sleeping just yet, so we took an additional 40 minutes or so to work on creating a logo for the production team that Shreyansh, Aly, and I have decided to create. We’re calling ourselves Studio Hourglass, and Shreyansh had already drafted a few versions of a logo we could use, so we spent some time creating the logo on the computer. Below is the logo we decided on.

Because I wanted to see my brother off before he left for a flight on Saturday morning, I stayed up until about 6:45 am. We had planned to get up on Saturday at 7 am. The “No Sleep” part of this film festival really wasn’t a joke.

Despite our lack of sleep, on Saturday, filming went even better than we ever could have expected. We stayed right on track with filming in the trains - we had access to three different trains, and we had only 30 minutes in each one. We had to finish filming before the tours started at 10 am, and to our luck, we finished right on time.

Filming at the Frisco Heritage Museum also went very well - most of our tribulations stemmed from the editing process.

To not make this too long-winded or longer than it has to be, I'll summarize and the main issues we had. We ran into a few problems as we realized we missed a few shots and didn’t account for some transitions. Plus, we couldn’t even edit on my computer as we had planned because my monitor has been acting up recently and randomly turns off on its own while it is in use.

Despite all of our issues, we managed to get a somewhat solid rough edit in by Saturday night. We managed to sleep at around 1 am, and we decided to get a little sleep, so we woke up on Sunday at 9 am. In hindsight, maybe we shouldn't have slept in a bit because the last few hours were a mad rush to finish and submit everything in time.

On Sunday, Shreyansh and I finished the edit, sound design, and score and managed to submit the film just barely in time. The satisfaction we got from finishing the project was unlike anything I’ve felt before. It was incredible and nerve-wracking, but it was exciting above all else.

As a part of Studio Hourglass, I proudly present our short film, Adrift.

This was truly an incredible experience, and I couldn’t be more proud of what all of us achieved in just 48 hours. My next steps are to get feedback from as many people as possible (including family, friends, and my mentor) and see what adjustments can be made. Shreyansh and I already have quite a few edits in mind, and we’ll work to implement those in the coming weeks. But for now, I think we could all just use some sleep and celebrate a job well done - though not for too long. As people say, there’s no rest for the weary, and with all the excitement we have for this project, it would do us well to not let our energy die off. Even with schoolwork ramping up in preparation for the AP exams and EOCs, I’m hoping to make at least a few edits this week to adjust the score and sound design and continue to push our limits to see just how good we can make this film.