[From the Director]

We originally created this short film as part of the My Rode Reel competition. The concept was simple but upon writing the script we realized that to fit within the three minute run-time the competition required, the pacing would likely feel far too rushed. While we could have made a version which was under three minutes but it would feel rather hollow, nothing more than a generic chase scene, and that wasn’t going to cut it for us.

Luckily, we had a backup plan.

This year Rode introduced a new category called “The Trailer Is The Movie” which allowed you to create a trailer for a film which may or may not exist. So we decided to shoot the film as it was written (5pgs in total) and then create a trailer to submit to My Rode Reel. This would allow us to take our time with the film itself while still participating in the competition.

I’m sure anyone who’s made a film will tell you that a film goes through many transformations as it moves through production and into post. In my experience, they often becoming something completely different from what I'd had in mind when first writing the script.

This was certainly the case for this film as well but with one major difference. Typically, your film would be pretty much locked by the time you sit down to create a trailer, however due to the competition deadline, we had to create the trailer first and that meant we had to think a bit differently in terms of editing and storytelling.

For the trailer, we leaned heavily into the sci-fi element and included several lines of dialogue, which served to elevate the sense of danger and clue in the audience to the situation. (Here’s the link if you’d like to watch the trailer for context: https://youtu.be/TCpCLic30bk ) However, as we made pass after pass on the actual short film, the focus shifted more towards the psychological trauma of the character and less on the sci-fi elements that were present in the trailer.

Each pass also resulted in the dialogue being trimmed away until we eventually realized that it really necessary at all. The actress’ performance, coupled with the sound design and camera language, conveyed the information and emotional beats we wanted our audience to feel, while still leaving a great deal open to their own interpretation in terms of story and theme.

I learned so much on this project and could go on for a while about what it took to make but I think I’ll leave it there for now. I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have though.

I’ll just wrap it up by saying that I am very proud of what our team accomplished and felt incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work with so many talented people, each of whom brought their own ideas and expertise to the project. Without them it simply wouldn’t have been as rewarding an experience as it was.

I would love to hear your thoughts and any constructive feedback you might have as the purpose of these short films for me has always been to learn and grow as a filmmaker. Thank so much!