We shot our newest short, You Were Always. It’s a narrative and experimental hybrid.
Logline: The day, the night, the love of your life: revisited.
The short is something Peter has been working on for a long time. It started as this story about a whirlwind romance told from the perspective of both sides of the relationship. That was what it was like about 7 years ago. It was a pretty basic premise: Jack and Jill fall in love, but they have differing opinions about how the day went. He became a bit obsessed with telling the story in a unique fashion: maybe in 3D with the left eye and right eye seeing different versions, maybe two screens next to each other or maybe even two films rotating around each other. But he then decided to scrap all that and put it on a shelf. Until a few years later he went into a pretty intense writers block while writing his first feature script and picked YWA back off the shelf for some inspiration.
That’s when the original script morphed into what it is now: a story about how our memories of the past are often overly sugar coated and that if we looked at the past honestly we would maybe not yearn for what once was. The story was still about different opinions of the same day, but now it shifted mainly towards Jill’s perspective. The story explores her favorite day of her life, but the more we scrutinize what happened that day, the more nefarious our initial her Jack becomes.
It was a fun writing experiment because we see the same day 3 times, so the script couldn’t change. Peter wanted to keep all the dialogue the same, but cut out certain lines so that when two lines said lovingly on day one appear on day three, they have an entirely new meaning. The same applies for the rest of the filmmaking process. Same stage directions, same movements. Just changes in the mood of the actors and cutting down the dialogue.
We cast Laurissa Romain (Top Five) and Granit Lahu (The Ranger) as our Jack and Jill, as well as Logan Sutherland (Abnormal Attraction) as our foil Richard. The filming process took a week in the Hudson Valley. Some locals and a lot of friends and family pulled together to help make this possible. Shooting was pretty tedious because we didn’t have to get each scene once, we had to get it three times. Complicated shot that takes 9 takes? Nope, now it’s 27 takes. So scheduling was pretty different than many of the other shoots we’ve worked on. But the crew and the cast we’re absolutely amazing. The script is more poetry than normal dialogue, but everyone was on board and really into making a beautiful film.
Now to the edit room to finish the film by the fall. And then, festivals we can only hope.