Two Brothers’ Journey to “Just Making the Movie”

Hi, we’re Norrie and Kephren Palmer and while we’ve been making films together since we were kids, the last few years have been busy with film school, writing, and gaining lots of experience as producers. Now, with everything we’ve learned, we’re teaming back up as a writing and directing team for our new short film, The Running Kind!

In March of this year, my brother Kephren and I decided to finally make a short film together. While we have been making little movies, scenes, and fake commercials since we were kids, this would be the first big project that we would direct together. Now, finally we were both out of school and we had carefully planned to line up the same gap in our day-job and producing schedules. What we hadn’t planned on was the question of “Well, what should we make?”

Should we write a pilot? A Feature? Should it be based on that IP? How will the strike affect things? Horror always sells. Only 3 network shows were bought this year. You need a proof of concept - no more than 10 minutes. A feature today is what a short film was in the 90s…

It was dizzying, discouraging, and ultimately, for us, entirely unhelpful. Gone were the days, it seemed, of running around and shooting something with your friends. “You said this is your job, now deliver!” “Make something that is really going to move the needle for your career… or else,” We said to ourselves.

Wading through all these different pressures, expectations, and words of advice felt like we were trying to run a marathon through four feet of mud. Our only comfort was knowing that this question had been shared by anyone who had ever tried to become a filmmaker.

This led to another comforting idea, the one that would ultimately pull us out of the mud and set us off on the marathon on solid ground. For everyone who had ever gotten where we wanted to go, the first step was always the same; they made something they liked.

This might seem irritatingly obvious, so perhaps we should amend it slightly. Every successful filmmaker had blocked out all the noise and made something that was true to who they were. Across decades, trends, industry upheavals, mediums, and technology, this seems to be the only advice that has held through all of it - if you’re making decisions that will lead to your best creative work, you’re probably on track. We set our criteria as…

We resolved to follow these guidelines as best we could and we set to work. Or rather, we are setting to work, in real time, day by day. We are currently in pre-production for the first “real” movie we’ll be directing together, and we’ll be checking in here at Script Magazine every few weeks to update y’all on our progress, mistakes, breakthroughs and reinventions of the wheel. So, since we’ll be essentially making this thing together, let us properly introduce ourselves…

About us

Kephren and I grew up in Stockton, California. We love Stockton and, although it is the butt of lots of unfair jokes, they did have one point - it could be really boring. Our parents loved movies and when award season came around, our family would travel all the way to Sacramento, where they showed the “art movies” that didn’t play in Stockton. We’d go from show to show, sometimes cramming in three showtimes a day. All this is to say, we watched a lot of movies and it wasn’t long before we tried our hand at making them.

When we started making our little movies with friends and family, it quickly became our favorite pastime. What we didn’t realize was that we were slowly learning how to make films. We both went to film school at USC and graduated from the same production track (myself in 2020 and Kephren in 2023).

Since graduating we have started our own production company, Matchbook Pictures. We have mostly focused on writing our own projects and freelance producing. As a producer, I have been able to travel around the country for production, from Illinois to Idaho to Hawaii. I have also taken movies to premiere at incredible festivals such as SXSW and Fantasia, with several of these projects now in active development as feature films and TV shows! Kephren has been a corporate content creator, making corporate films and advertisements for the last year.

We both love producing and, while it has been a really productive and fruitful path for both of us, we’ve always known that writing and directing was our ultimate goal and that taking these projects, fun though they were, would only delay our future films. Which brings us back to our decision to push all of our chips in the center and just go for it.

You’ve decided to finally make something. What is it?

Deciding on the project

When a project begins from the frantic impetus of holy shit, holy shit, a year just passed and I’m no closer to my goals, it can be easy to pick up any script and run with it as fast as you can. This is not a good idea. While that productive stress will help you finally take the leap, your script will be the parachute that guides you safely down. Kephren and my one advantage was this - we had never stopped writing. Even when we would end up tossing everything out, we continued to meet - after work, 4 days a week, for 3 hours each meeting. We felt that meeting for a minimum of 12 hours a week (and often more) would be beneficial down the road, even if we didn’t yet know what it would result in. 

The best thing to come out of this was that by the time we decided to finally make something of our own, we had a script that we loved. It was a script that reflected our tastes, our voice, and our point of view as filmmakers. We figured if ever there was a project to show people who we are and what we can do, it was this one.

Our Film

The film is called The Running Kind and it follows Cary, an "unhappy screw-up" who is unable to hold down a good job or a stable relationship because he lacks the maturity to directly address any of his problems. When his only friend Rick announces he is dying of cancer, Cary decides that instead of going it alone and feeling like the last man standing, he will fake his own death and start his life over "the right way," running away yet again.

The Running Kind is a fast-paced, kaleidoscopic, dark comedy that tells a universal story in a unique way, playing out over a series of vignettes, memories, and nightmares, as if to mimic Cary's life flashing before his eyes. The film takes place in the fields, railyards, and buildings of our hometown in order to evoke the tone and setting of the stories we hope to tell. The film is inspired, both in style and substance, by the character-driven movies of the 70s new Hollywood movement. Among our biggest inspirations were films like Midnight Cowboy, Mikey and Nicky, and All That Jazz.

Now that we’ve cleared our schedules in order to make something and decided on the film we are going to make, we just have to answer that final, and most daunting question… How are we gonna get this thing made?

How are you going to pull it off?

We wrote the script big. Like, really big. Like 40 locations big. Why did we decide to saddle ourselves with such a big task? Well, first and foremost, it’s the movie that we most want to see. The second reason is because it’s cool! Movies are supposed to be big and fun and if you want to have a career as someone who captivates an audience, you need to show them something that you find captivating.

But that being said, if you’re going to try to pull off the biggest scope possible you need to have a really good strategy for the production. The biggest lesson we learned in our producing work was that each production, in general, had at least one major challenge and at least one potential advantage. If you could use one to leverage the other - you could get the most bang for your buck. 

Got a bunch of locations you can’t afford? Go somewhere you can get them for free - like Stockton! Need a lot of extras? Shoot in the place where your whole family can come down and stand around for the day. Got a long shoot with many locations and company moves each day? Shoot the majority of it with a fast and adaptable skeleton crew, or consider designing the look of the film around docu-style run and gun set-ups.

Our biggest piece of advice to those in our shoes is this - make something that shows off your voice and point of view, and make it at home. More often than not, going back to your hometown will be the way you can turn your biggest challenge into an advantage.

What’s Next?

Now that you’ve decided to make your film, you’ve decided what that film is going to be, and you’ve created a rough plan for how to build the production in the most efficient and indie way possible - the real work begins and a whole crop of new questions spring up.

Where is the money gonna come from? Who will be crazy enough to join the crew? How will I find good locations? When do I start looking for actors? How do I manage everything at once?

We’re going to walk you through our answers to these questions and others on the rest of our journey. Every couple of weeks we’ll check in with updates as we round out pre-production and roll right into shooting, and all the way through the post process so that hopefully you can learn from our ideas, mistakes, success, tips, and stories.

If you'd like to learn a little more about the project, see our full pitch video with the comps, or follow along, please check out this link to our crowdfunding campaign.