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On a WHIM

I don’t know how we ended up here. Well, I do but the exaggeration sounds much more magical. It all started on one dark and stormy night. No, not a cliché. This was during Storm Ophelia. A 48 hour short film festival had been announced and I had been involuntarily dragged into a group of four people who were embarrassingly called “Film Fam” (aren’t you glad we didn’t keep that name?) 24 hours into the competition every single one of them dropped out of the group. This was not a high point for me. I had been talking to Elliot about the competition earlier that day and I tried to get him on board with some POLITE begging. We decided not to do a film on the personification of Storm Ophelia and, instead, we tried our best to capture a friendship drifting apart as one friend moves up to college. We also had the idea of capturing 3 minutes of floating raincoats talking to each other. I’m glad we chose the more relatable option. We had NO actors, NO equipment and NO location so my friend and I had to act in it. I will never be able to watch it with a straight face. People liked what we did with our smartphone though. We could excuse our TERRIBLE quality because... it was a FaceTime video. We were just trying to be more authentic. We won that film competition which was such a surprise. Our “professional actor” didn’t even head to the competition screening. That same film won us “Best Irish Film” at the Dublin Smartphone Film Festival which was amazing after being glued to a chair and forced to watch the terrifyingly good quality at that festival.

We didn’t want to stop there. The next opportunity presented itself to us in early January in the form of the Moment Invitational Film Festival. Another smartphone film festival. This time we had a month instead of just 48 hours. We sure did waste that time. It took us 15 WHOLE days to come up with an idea because we wanted something perfect. Scrapped ideas include: a kid crossing a road to realise that he’s actually dead, a train full of mannequins and a runaway pram that gets hit immediately. The idea for “Lady Luck” was actually our first but it took us half a month to realise that it had potential. It was meant to be a horse race that a woman watches on repeat and the whole idea was hanging the mood of the film on one turning point; creating suspense with just one, small reveal. I managed to finish the script in three days (thank you complete isolation from everyone and anything). It was the first script I’d ever fully written but I am proud of some of the lines. Here’s some: “The lottery theme splashes across the screen in reds and blues and squares”, “She yips and hollers and is as animated as an octogenarian confined to a seat could possibly be” and “accepts the wishy-washy, pink liquid and too-bright pills that are thrust at her”. After the script was done, we began the most arduous task of all. Pre-production. I’ve never called so many people. I’ve never e-mailed so many people. I’ve never been that stressed. We had to license videos, find actors and find a location all in the space of three days. Tuesday the 20th of February seems to have almost ingrained itself into my soul. The shoot was on Friday and it took MUCH longer then expected. What made things worse was that the actor had offered her home to be used and we took three hours longer than we thought we would. Her husband was barred entrance to his own home. The next five days were comprised of editing and I don’t think I can capture how gruelling it was in words so I won’t. The end product, however, has made me more proud then any creative project I have ever embarked on.

What’s planned for the future? We’ve been working on a big project for the past 3 months that is scheduled to be shot around April. If you know me in person, the month of May is when I stop talking about bathrooms and graffiti. The short will be called “Privy” and we were trying to capture how a public bathroom is a mixture of private and public. We’re very excited to see where we can take Extra Extra and we hope that you stay to find out where that is.

-Matthew Roche