How My Film Became The Most Important Thing To Me
I’m a student in the Television and Film program at Buffalo State College. In the spring of 2017, I was scheduled to take a senior level class where you are required to write, produce, and direct your own short film. Up to this point, this was the biggest project that I would work on given the requirements, deadlines, and restrictions. Knowing this, in November of 2016, I wrote a few scripts in anticipation of the inevitable semester, formalizing the various ideas that were buzzing around in my head. One of those ideas was titled Academic Probation.
The idea was complex, yet simple for a short drama: A college student finds out that his mom has cancer amidst a battle over a thesis his professor stole from him.
I knew I wanted it to be a drama that could easily be shot in and around a college campus, because why make it harder on myself if I don’t have to? But I also saw something in this idea that I didn’t see in many films coming out of a college film program. This wasn’t yet another short where a student is late for class or an exam and has to race across campus. This was a film about a boy dealing with a very real, dramatic problem that many viewers relate to.
In January, classes began and we started to develop our scripts and plan the actual production of them. It was at this time that news broke to me and my family that my uncle was diagnosed with cancer.
Obviously, the short film and it’s subject matter that I had, entirely coincidently, written just two months before became something much more meaningful than a school project. As the financing and final stages of pre-production reached their concluding stages, I started the most stressful, thrilling, fun, uncertain, adventurous, dark, and exciting part of making a film of any scale: filming.
There were many problems, as there often are, in the production of AP. Regrettably, those problems were rooted in this being the first project that I was entirely at the helm of, and my inexperience with producing and directing a film.
I am still VERY inexperienced and green, but this project taught me a lot.
For example: the more prepared and cautious you are in the pre-production stage, the better the production stage will go. So have call sheets READY and CORRECT, have a shot list WITH BACKUP LISTS that you can use if and when locations ask for a change in plans, and PLEASE JUST BUY BATTERIES to have on set IN CASE YOU NEED THEM.
Without going into too much detail, the casting of Amanda Vink will stand as one of the biggest lessons this film taught me. As the director, you need to have production fully ready for you to do your job. But what went over the producing team’s heads and what’s more important is that the talent, whom you’re not paying, ALSO needs the production fully ready IN ORDER to do your job. The director is capable and is essential to overcoming obstacles in order to get the script shot, but the only way the talent can even do their job, especially voluntarily, is if you have created a set that’s ready for them to get in front of the camera and comfortably give you their talent.
There’s no excuse for call sheets being in correct or not ready, and no matter who’s to blame for the problems we ran into on set, I will take all of the criticism and blowback for the failure to make sure that talent is ready to help me. Amanda Vink delivered her performance despite this foolish unpreparedness with grace, a sense of humor, and a willingness to see her role in the production to the end despite the obstacles that the set suffered on the way to wrap. Given the film’s weight on my shoulders, “thank you” will never be enough for what working with her taught me.
When we wrapped the principal photography on AP, the stress of the film really started to weigh on me as I fully realized the intricate, hard work of the post-production stage, and my uncle’s battle with his cancer.
In a month, I edited, scored, and finalized the film with a very key change in the story coming out of this stage. In the script, the main character breaks down at the very end of the film as his mother reassures him of her endless love. In the final cut of the film, the main character breaks down as an unnamed character reassures him that his mother would be proud of him if she were still alive.
I never once thought of the mother dying, but it was essential in the finalization of the film and felt like the correct ending for the film — even if people didn’t like it.
The film was over, but the stress didn’t leave. Over the summer, I battled with my uncertainty and frustrations with life and death, as well as the coincidental elements of a film that I wrote before the actualization of my uncle’s diagnosis.
His battle darkened, got worse and worse as the weeks went on. My visits with him were few and far between given the busy schedule of the film, and each time I saw him it was like I was meeting a new person. The physical transformation of him changed so drastically in such a short time that I was often at a loss for words when talking with him.
I can only imagine how my aunt felt, being at his side every single day.
I saw and heard things from him in his battle, and through updates from family, that no person should have to see or hear let alone experience. Cancer was, and is, no longer an ambiguous dark cloud that millions of people ‘deal’ with. It is a ruthless, merciless, callous, and drastic life-change of a battle that will shake a family to their bones.
My film was no longer a school project.
On August 6th, 2017, my uncle died surrounded by members of our large and loving family.
Up until this day, I battled with myself regarding the release of the film, ultimately deciding it was insensitive to my family during this dark time. Now, with my uncle finally at the utmost peace, I am releasing the film a year later.
I stand proud with every single problem this film has (and there are plenty). I embrace the wrong decisions I made during this time as well as the lessons that came from them, not the least of which is that a film can become something much more than what it was scripted, planned or intended to become.
Watch Academic Probation now:
…and be kind.
