No clue. Absolutely no clue what was going on here. I'm just diggin' the fact that I've got friends who trust me and are basically up to make stuff no matter what.
In the latter part of June, I'd bought a one-way ticket to New York City with plans to connect with friends, make stuff, and meet new people. In prepping for the trip I reached out to Olivia Abiassi to see if she'd be up to make something while I was in town.
Olivia is an actress friend of mine who I stumbled upon while casting a short film a few years ago. I say stumbled because she was actually off-camera reading the female lead's part to help with the male talent's audition video. In hearing her read I immediately knew she was the lead I was looking for. She worked her tail off for that little passion project of mine and her performance was more than I could ask for. Fast forward a couple years she's now living and working in NYC.
Normally I'll put solid time and effort into prepping for a shoot. This project was more or less thrown together during my 45-minute subway commute from Washington Heights to her apartment on the Lower East Side. There was no scout ahead of time; not even a decent concept. Just me plowing through her Instagram account and listening to a TON of Logic's "The Incredible True Story" album.
A few months ago she had posted a short clip of herself prepping for something and accidentally – and absolutely – struck gold. She's got a great sense of humor and doesn't seem to take herself very seriously. She's also got great eyes and facial expressions which absolutely deliver on camera.
This simple Instagram post opened the idea of her getting completely lost in her own world and caring less about what people around her thought. In just about everything I try to make there's a bit of me braided in somewhere. For this utterly informal short I started her off buried in her phone trying to keep up with either the nonsense of social media or the non-stop stream of the world's bad news. In putting on her headphones, she's able to escape for a bit.
From a production standpoint, the headphones were key. I sent her a playlist I'd put together during my commute, but we ended up keeping Logic's "Fade Away" on repeat and that kept her movement timing consistent. I on the other hand couldn't hear the music, gave some basic direction, and just had to keep up.
Just about every movement piece I've done recently has been shot off-speed. There's a TON of grace and forgiveness in shooting in higher frame rates, but for this piece, I wanted to challenge myself with shooting in real time and intentionally using longer takes in the edit vs. the easy out with quick pacing to hide mistakes.
The edit took a bit longer than I expected in trying to sync her movements to the music as well as the un-rehearsed and un-controllable aspects of the footage we got. There were plenty of interesting-looking shots that I just couldn't use because they didn't fit the music – not to mention the unusably soft shots I blew focus on.
We're not curing cancer or anything, but we did have a very loose storyline with a beginning, middle, and end. We honestly just wandered around the Lower East Side not far from her apartment, looking for good and interesting light. The ice cream break was intentional, but accidentally hitting someone on the subway with her purse while she was dancing wasn't. Thank God that very large man was cool as hell.
UPDATE: As per usual, the footage from this film is available for licensing over at Filmsupply. Speaking of footage licensing, here's an example of how it was used to create an actual spot. Thank goodness too because the proceeds helped me pay rent in May 2020 during the Covid-19 nonsense.