Northwest Film Forum

The Northwest Film Forum (in the great city of Seattle, WA) challenges visiting filmmakers to make a one-shot film. There with Medicine For Melancholy off a month of steady travel and promotion, I was in no mood to make a film (not even one consisting of only a single shot), and thus I made what I thought were unreason...able demands on two days notice: three teenagers, a 1980s model American car and a fully-staffed corner store. See, this was my first time dealing with these folks so I was unaware of something very basic about the place: the Northwest Film Forum gets shit DONE. Equipped with my teens, my car and my corner store, cinematographer Ben Kasulke and I spent two hours on a Thursday afternoon blocking, rehearsing and very "rough around the edges" shooting this one-shot film. I thought to make a production challenge of it; none of the previous one-shots moved the camera and so we decided to have movement, the idea being to turn one-shot into a series of evolving shots by altering the frame. Second, we wanted to make it subjective, to immerse the viewer in the emotions of the female lead. To do this, we shot the entire film in slow-mo at 48fps, selectively varying the frame-rate in post with her mood. I did the speed ramps and sound design myself in Final Cut, a program I was trying to teach myself at the time (as with A YOUNG COUPLE), and the result is a very low-fi, acid-trip attempt at subjective cinema. And if there's any attempt at narrative here, it's more or less about capturing the moment when a teenage girl realizes the guys she's hanging out with -- who she thought were cool for being so 'bout it -- really don't give a sh!t about her. When it was all said and done, the only remaining task was to argue NWFF quarterback Adam Sekuler the title of the series: I still contend they're not one "shot" films, but rather one "take" films =)