Making A Short Film

“Just keep shooting,” Star Wars producer Rick McCallum told me once. I met him in the hallway at a Star Wars convention in 2002 and told him I wanted to make films and, standing there smoking a cigarette indoors, McCallum put his hand on my shoulder and gave me that sage advice. “You’ll get there if you just keep shooting.”

I kept that in the back of my mind for many years and listening to the advice, working on narrative films, shorts, and documentaries. Until the economy dried up in 2008 or so and I had to take a steady, film adjacent job in government communications, but in the back of my mind were always the words of Rick McCallum. I was writing and teaching still, even writing for magazines like Script and teaching screenwriting for the University of Utah’s continuing education program, but not getting to flex those muscles as much as I’d used to.

Then I had a friend pass away. Jeff Michael Vice was the long-time film critic for the Deseret News—one of the two large daily newspapers in Utah at the time—and a great friend. This was ten years ago, and I got the itch to write a script that was inspired by him and to honor him and his profession.

But working a full-time job that forces you to produce film assets constantly isn’t conducive to working on your own creative work, but I scraped together the money to shoot a short film in 2018 called 3 1/2 Stars. In 2018, I called in every favor I could think of to put together the movie with the change I could scrounge. I threw my tax return into the budget. I put my heart and soul into it with a pretty green crew. But I made it.

Unfortunately, with that green crew, there were some problems with the footage we got back. Well, not the footage, but the audio. The sound just wasn’t working, we didn’t get what we needed on set. We tried to loop it and that didn’t work very well either since we didn’t have anyone to do post-production audio. I spent about a year and a half working on the post-production myself and then… yeah… the pandemic happened.

My access to the facilities to finish dried up and the film never got finished.

“Art is never finished, it’s abandoned,” is a quote often attributed to George Lucas and it never felt so painfully clear this time.

But this year, I received grants to craft and finish a different short film and I took the time and facilities to finish this one as best I could, so it could at least seem finished and abandoned. I thought the best thing to do with it would be to release it online and offer some thoughts about writing it and making it, especially with some hindsight.

Writing It

The first thing I had to start with was the concept. I had a character that would be a cartoony version of my friend who had passed away, but it would also tackle some of the things I felt about the importance of film criticism as an art. And that’s when I realized the premise was sitting right in front of me: what if a film critic falls for a woman with terrible taste in movies?

Knowing I was going to make a short film and have to produce it myself, I didn’t want it to go longer than 20 pages. In retrospect, I should have tried to limit myself to 7-8 pages. Talking to festival programmers, a running time of less than ten minutes is the sweet spot. And at the point where you’re shooting 20 pages, you might as well be shooting 70 and just making a feature. Lesson learned there.

With the two concepts: the idea that I wanted to write a treatise about the nobility of film criticism combined with the sort of dialogue I grew up loving in Woody Allen movies—before I realized how problematic he was—I thought I knew how to structure the short film. (I couldn’t separate the influence his movies had on me though, and there is definitely some of that DNA in the construction of the scenes and jokes.) Working backward, I hit upon the element of the character writing a piece defending his ever-devalued art, and that gave me a frame for the beginning and the end.

Really, I was also thinking about the strength of the opening of Manhattan. Again, problematic on a lot of levels, but incredibly influential from my younger days.

It was a matter of reverse engineering the situations and structure from there. How could I communicate that he was lonely in the course of his job? How could I put the girl in his path? How could I somehow exemplify the sort of film “critic” that has, in my view, taken over with their takes that don’t add any context to the conversation, but are a straight “see this” or “don’t see this” dichotomy?

I also decided that I wanted to incorporate some timely events with layoffs of non-essential news personnel that happen with shocking frequency. My friend Jeff was laid off near the end of his life after decades of faithful service and insightful reviews and struggled to get back on his feet in that world afterward. It felt like a ripe moment to mine for the drama of the situation. Especially with how he tries to obscure the pain of it as he looks for love.

I did three or four drafts, honing it down repeatedly, trying to make the dialogue shine and make sense of the transitions. That’s something I see too many screenwriters and filmmakers ignore in the script phase, and that’s planning exactly how one scene is going to transit to the next. I really tried to pay careful attention to that in this screenplay, and I think it’s one of the solid bits of filmmaking I did.

The one I might be most proud of is the jump cut from his desk in the newsroom with the pink slip to the pink slip sitting on the bar he’s eating. It felt like an elegant bit of storytelling that also got us from one scene to another.

Making The Movie

As I set out to make the movie, I had to take a look at the locations I likely had access to and transform the script based on the likely logistics of what I needed to tell the story.

I knew I was going to need access to movie theaters and we ended up shooting at a total of three. Two of them are owned by the Salt Lake Film Society, a regular partner of Sundance almost since the beginning. Those would be the Broadway Theatre, seen as the characters leave the press screening at the beginning of the film, and the Tower Theater, where they go see Casablanca. They were kind enough to let us come in and shoot after hours and it worked out really well for the finale of the film. The third theatre is a Salt Lake City-owned cinema pub called Brewvies, and they were kind enough to let me rent a theatre for a couple of hours at a reasonable price to film the interiors of the press screening.

Then I had to find a bar and a well-lit city street. The bar was the most difficult to find because I basically had to call every personal friend I had that happened to be a bartender to see who would allow us to come in and film for an evening—not just any evening, though. One that wouldn’t be too busy and one that would fit with our “shooting on the weekends” production schedule.

The city street seemed like it would be the easiest, but we ended up picking the wrong street the first time and decided to reshoot it on a different street the next week. It had a lot to do with lighting at night and the quality of the sound we were able to capture, but it definitely helped improve the performances to redo the scene.

We struggled against not always having the right equipment since I spent the money I had been able to put together on renting lenses. That was part of the issue with the post-production. We were using older sound equipment that really did me no favors at all.

It is always a fascinating experience to see how your words work on the page as opposed to on set, and I think it’s an experience that will help any writer. If you want to learn to be a better screenwriter, be on set when your words are being filmed and see how they’re being filmed. It’ll give you a much better sense of how to do things right the first time in your screenplay.

Things I’d Do Differently

Neil Gaiman says that you learn storytelling by finishing things, and I think that’s very true. You learn about what you should have done in the first place and you learn what works and what doesn’t. You learn every time you take a bite of the proverbial apple. Case in point - the first feature-length documentary I worked on never saw any release. Not because it wasn’t good, but because we were young 20-somethings who thought everyone would be cool and sign releases at some indeterminate point in the future. When some of the participants started to realize they would probably look bad, no matter how generous the cut of the film was, they refused to sign releases. We finished the movie, but we couldn’t sell or release it. But the next time we set out to make a documentary feature, we were zealots about getting releases in the first place, and our next two films got bought and released by the Disinformation Company.

Along those lines, if I were actually in a place to put this film in festivals, there are a number of things I’d probably change. For one, I’d hire someone to do a complete sound mix. Maybe do new dialogue recording, too. The question is about return on investment, though. That would cost, at minimum thousands of dollars for something that is too old to get programmed in most festivals, too long to be programmed in most others, and too short to be a profitable feature film.

I’d also work harder to blur the screen in the final moments of the film. We tried to blur it as best we could with the lenses we had and it worked to a point, but hit a little too close to the mark as far as recognizable copyrighted material.

In the writing, I think the film smacks a little bit about a pompous old white guy with the correct opinion grooming the naive young girl. Definitely not the intention, and I tried to smooth the edges off of it in the first place, but I think the dynamic would need to change in another go at it. I definitely think I addressed the fix in the feature film script I wrote based on this short. It was definitely a learning process, but I’ve grown a lot more conscious as a writer and as a person in the last six years.

3 1/2 Stars paid dividends for me in lessons learned. From how to direct actors, how to better craft my stories, and how to do better cinematic storytelling.

Next Steps

I wrote a feature film version of the screenplay that expands on all of the ideas and adds characters and dilemmas to it, and I took all the lessons I learned working on this short film into that feature script. Every film festival I’ve had a film programmed into, there’s one constant question: what are you working on next? Again, as part of that learning process, I realized that film festivals are really about networking with people who might be able to help make your next film a reality. If people liked your short, having a feature film script ready to expand on a short makes perfect sense for that to be ready at hand. And I’d have it ready to send to folks. Because of the post-production problems and the pandemic getting in the way of things, I wasn’t able to take this film to festivals the way I wanted to. But, like Rick McCallum told me, “Just keep shooting.”

To that end, I wrote another short film. I’m really proud of it. I learned a lot of lessons from this short film. For one, its running time is less than ten minutes. I was more mindful of the logistics. I also didn’t put my own money in this time—I was able to get grants and crowdfund the entirety of the budget. And I knew to spend anything I needed to in order to make sure the sound was right. It’s called The Lost Boys and hopefully, I’ll see you at a film festival near you with it, soon.

If you’d like to read the original draft of the screenplay and the shooting script of 3 1/2 Stars, they’re available here.

You can keep up with Bryan Young at his website.