No Cemetery!

Joey and I are very... ambitious people (a nice way to say people who stress themselves out unnecessarily?). I mean, being ambitious at its core isn't a bad trait. Our ambitiousness has brought us far in some cases, leading us to create some great work we are proud of, but it doesn't always help. In most of our creative endeavors, we typically put too much on our plate for what we want to accomplish with our work.

Joey and I had a meeting recently and discussed all that we wanted to do with our project. Right before this, we had a great lesson in class on screenwriting. The essential takeaway from the lesson was that we should ask ourselves this:

Initially, the idea Joey and I had for our film was everything but surrounded on a central idea. He was attached to a specific scene he wanted us to do, which was of a child holding onto the fence of a cemetery from the outside. To include this scene in the story, he wanted to add an element that shows the death of the protagonist's mother and reflect on the relationship they had. And upon first hearing about this scene, I was hooked on it too. We also wanted our story to do with poverty, gentrification, love, family, just loads of other topics that would have made the story way too long or difficult to communicate with the amount of "in conclusions" we wanted to make of it.

Upon discussing the most important message of the story, the part that had to do with the protagonist's mother seemed unnecessary. We decided to build the story around the stealing scene when the child would steal a toy from a store to give to their crush on their birthday. Joey and I still wanted to keep the crush part because we thought it was a cute way to show the protagonist's innocence and still keep that sort of coming of age aspect of the story we wanted.

It was important for us to recognize the challenges that the production of our initial story had for us, and see which challenges are actually worth taking on. I'm glad we got to focus on what we really wanted to tell with our short film.