"Pursuit"

Jack Potter, aka "Chad", is a friend of mine and one of the youth from my church's youth group that I'm a leader at. He's in high school and loves movies almost as much as me A while back he came to me wanting to make a short film... his teacher was going to give extra credit to him if he made a short film that was both "romance" and "horror". We created a story, wrote a script, created story boards, planned out a shooting schedule around our busy actors, filmed it in 3 days, and I edited it in 2. I'm very pleased with it. We had fun making it, and I haven't made something just for fun in a long time. Chad learned a lot and it was great putting my film school knowledge into practice again. We made a lot of mistakes and silly errors, but learned from them and are better for it. I hope you enjoy the film!

The most difficult part was the scheduling... We spent months working on the story, script, and story boarding. By the time we finished, we had 10 days to schedule, shoot, and edit the movie. Scheduling around our talent (actors) was crucial and made the shoot a bit rushed. We only had 3 possible days for Chad, 2 days (12 hours total) for Holy Hands aka Matthew Overall, and 4 hours on 1 day for Greggs aka Jordan Overall. We only needed 1.5 hours at Jordan Escue's... OH, and she designed the "Aiden + Marie" board. That was SO CLUTCH!

The time restraints meant we HAD to shoot out of order... and let me tell you... that was not so easy. I put the schedule together and I was shocked to find out how many wardrobe changes we had in the short film... Chad has 11 wardrobe changes in this film, but we almost had to shoot each change twice, so he probably changed outfits around 18 times. Holy had to change his 7 or so times as well. Keeping the continuity of what he was wearing for what scenes was so interesting... all of our pre-production was SO crucial! There is no way we could've made it work without it.

Another level of tension was on our first day of shooting... I won't go into too much detail, but we almost got robbed. The thief was moving closer to my gear every 5 minutes or so... literally moving from tree to tree. Every time I looked up he was at a new tree, closer to us. About 3 trees in, I was like, "Guys, he wants to steal my gear...." They didn't think so. I knew so. I finally looked up and he was behind the playground where we couldn't see him... I didn't care about the awkwardness of what I was going to do. I got up and grabbed all of my gear and moved it right to where we were standing. The thief IMMEDIATELY walked very quickly out of the park glancing back occasionally. After walking about 2 houses away, he SPRINTED around the corner. Lol... he was as scared of us as we were of him.

ANYwhoosle... back to "Pursuit"... we called a lot of audibles on the fly due to the time constraints. There were a couple shots that we didn't get that I NEEDED in the edit, so I drove out to the location and filmed some pick up shots to bring the story together. Most of the b-roll during the walking was filmed right then AND another shot that is instrumental in the story. If you can guess it, I'll give you a socially distanced virtual high five and props. Anyway, we had a good time filming. Proud of the final product. Definitely, scratched an itch I've had for a long time... Now I want to shoot some more shorts.