I met Will, Miles, and Justin back when I was doing a handful of portrait shoots with new people every week. I had them running around LES hopping over walls and throwing traffic cones. In the hour or so that we shot, I saw the subtle ways their personalities worked off each other. Inspired by this, I aimed to write a script that emphasized these traits.

PRE-PRODUCTION: A few hours after our photoshoot I asked if they'd be interested in doing a film, they confirmed their interest. Over the next two days I wrote the script.

With only $200 to make the film, half going to props and the rest to meals, I aimed to add in elements to increase that production value without increasing cost i.e. things which my peers advised against doing: the prop gun in public, screaming in the subway, or climbing the Willamsburg bridge.

I was on version 1.5 of the script when I decided we just roll with it. The next week we were shooting.

PRODUCTION OVERVIEW: After the first few minutes of line reading with the non-actors, I had determined that improvised lines were a better bet. For each scene, I gave them a goal to achieve by the end of the scene and only micro adjustments to that goal after each take.

PRODUCTION CHALLENGES - PART I: Scheduling. The bastard.

Initially, I aimed to shoot the whole film in one fourteen-hour day. I still maintain that this was feasible. Alas, talent schedules did not align.

Shooting was broken into 2 days, then 3... ultimately 5 total over the course of a month. There was an entire day spent on climbing the bridge just to get one shot of the gun going into the bag.

Unpaid talent leaves you open to the (not incredibly unreasonable) possibility of people prioritizing paying jobs and frequent last second cancellations. Frustrating as it is, this is what you leave yourself open to when making a film with no money.

Ultimately, we were never able to shoot everything we needed. I attempted to make it work in the cut, but there are some glaring rough edges.

PRODUCTION CHALLENGES - PART II: No lock is impregnable.

A whole shooting day was added the first night we went to climb the bridge. While you can walk straight up to the top of the Williamsburg bridge via access stairs, there is a steel door in the middle of the staircase which was, as we discovered, padlocked shut.

I was crushed for a moment, as I thought the whole bridge sequence was f*cked. On the walk down the bridge, I made a decision.

I decided to take a chapter out of the hacker's handbook: study anything close enough and you can find vulnerabilities to exploit.

A week later we shot the bridge sequence.

PRODUCTION CHALLENGES - PART III: Sound is a bitch, for a one-man band.

Pretty much all sound in the film came from lav mics. Given that I didn't have the time or mental bandwidth to scan for new frequencies every 10 feet and this is NYC, the interference was abhorred.

I have since determined that a pocket recorder capable of 32 bit float recording and remote monitoring is ideal for this use case. As of this moment, there is only one device on the market truly fit for this: the Tenticle Sync Track E Recorder.
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POST-PRODUCTION: After the month of shooting, I was quite disheartened. I was also holding out that we would actually finish shooting. It was 6 months before I folded and finally started cutting.

The improv turned out to be very challenging to cut. For the heavily conversational scene in the middle of the film, takes ranged from 3-15 minutes and the lines were different each time.

I wanted to throw up my hands on a number of occasions, but after much chipping away I feel that I might've found the only way to make the scene work. Say what you will, but I feel the illusion holds up.

TAKEAWAY: This was my first shot at writing and directing a film and it was quite a profound experience in confirming a thesis of mine: Filmmaking belongs to the thieves.

Any film worth watching is a miraculous moment stolen from time. A moment brought about by meticulous preparation and dumb luck.

Given the newfound accessibility to the technology and information needed for this undertaking, it's essentially of equal difficulty at any scale or budget.

- Mory