Pink Strawberry - 10-minute short drama
"A getaway driver is forced to confront his conscience during an encounter in the midst of a heist."
Earlier this year I finished my studies in the BA Filmmaking program in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. During the 6 month exchange period I had the pleasure of studying along and working with some the most talented, motivated and dedicated fellow students ever. This project was both an ’end of the year’ film as well as an extra curriculum film production for me. Luckily I was able to assemble a dedicated crew and people were happy to tag along before my studies ended in Glasgow.
The writing process for me was a bit different this time around. My goal was to create a story structure that would keep the audience more engaged. I remember struggling a lot to come up with a good idea for the story. After the holidays and visiting home, I was suddenly struck with an idea for the film and the general story structure started to form. The subject matter, or the core dilemma of the main character, wasn’t something that I could deeply relate to, but it served as a good setting for the story. After all my goal was to succeed with the structure.
I do slightly regret trying to tell a story that doesn’t resonate with me deep down, but on the contrary, I’m very pleased that I tried something new and managed to pull it off quite nicely. At this point, while still in film school, I think it's important to constantly try new ways of approaching the craft and even more importantly, make mistakes and learn from them.
As I started planning the shooting schedule, I soon found out that there's no shortage of film productions in the time frame I had to to arrange the shoot in. I was struggling to find suitable dates for the whole crew but eventually we found a two-day window that seemed to fit everyone's schedule.
The shoot itself was exhausting. We shot the whole 10-minute film in just two nights. What’s impressive to me in a student production is that we only started getting behind schedule towards the end of the second night. I had clearly learnt a thing or two from my previous short film productions since the time estimation for shooting each scene was more realistic this time around. Despite the grueling working hours, the crew was very efficient, and I think we had just the right amount of people on set.
I started the editing process right after the shoot. Originally I had plans to have someone else do the editing, but after playing around with the footage, I decided to do it myself because I wanted to get more dialogue and film editing experience. I also wanted to see how hard it was to stay objective with the footage and dismiss the always unreachable original vision. I find it hard to look at the footage objectively and see the potential of the excisting material as the director, and even worse, as the screenwriter.
In the end I was able to make the decision to cut some parts out. I still think that someone else could’ve made the film as a whole work better since I was too invested in the original structure. I also ended up doing the sound design by myself and I’m glad that I did because I learnt a lot from that process. A dedicated sound designer would’ve surely elevated the production value and made the film feel a lot more polished. But I figured it's more important to get as much hands-on experience as possible with every aspect of the craft to really be able to master it one day.
I have to say that after finishing the post-production and seeing the end result, I was probably the most pleased I’ve ever been with a finished film. The structure worked well and I succeeded in directing the actors towards a more naturalistic performance. I was also happy to have found many new ways of communicating with actors. Now I’m certainly a lot more confident in my ability to direct a film in English. The language barrier was probably the biggest challenge, or should I say fear, before the shoot, but it turns out that even at this early stage, I’m totally capable of making films in English. And that has to be the biggest giveaway from this production.
