Miss-Understanding

Miss-Understanding is my first film. It only exists because the film I actually planned collapsed on shoot day, and the four of us left standing made something up instead.

Here's what happened, I had the whole thing prepared: a script, a cast, locations, a shoot schedule, a borrowed phone, a clip-on mic, even a color grade drafted ahead of time. Then shoot day arrived and most of the cast hadn't read the script. Two of the leads wandered off partway through. Next thing I knew my parents were already in the canteen waiting to drive us home, and I had maybe half an hour left before we had to leave.

So I turned to the three classmates (one of them was part of the original cast) still hanging around me and asked if they wanted to film something, anything. The plot was theirs--I want to be honest about that. They came up with it together: two girlfriends, Kay and Azriel, fighting because Kay thinks Azriel is cheating on her, and Mateo, the friend who locks them in a room until they sort it out. I did the blocking and directed it on the spot. Every line was improvised.

We shot the whole thing in about thirty minutes on an old Samsung phone. If you watch closely you can see the mic clipped to the actors the entire time. We never had a spare second to hide it, and honestly I've stopped minding. The finished cut runs around six or seven minutes.

I posted it on July 2. Two days later it had nearly forty thousand views--far more than anything I'd made before it.

I keep this one near the front because it's the clearest example I have of how I actually work. We spent weeks preparing a film that never got completely shot. The one that got made, and found an audience, was the mess I had to hold together after the plan died. Knowing a good idea the second a castmate says it out loud, and keeping four tired people moving when there's no time left on the clock — that's the part of producing I care about most.