This short film was created for the Four Points Film Project 2018 competition. An eccentric hypnotherapist dives into the repressed memories of her patients to uncover a mystery that ties them all together.
THE FILM
MY STORY BEHIND THE STORY
My usual collaborators, Timothy Montoya and Luke Landsell, and I decided we wanted to try out the 48-hour contest format late in the year and so entered the Four Points Film Project to push our typical guerrilla shooting format and skeleton crew into a tighter turnaround and up the stakes of what we could get done with our smaller resources. In advance of the competition weekend, we assembled a great cast consisting of Rachel Posler, AJ Troup, Megan Cochrane and Beau Bielski - which rounded out our cast and crew consisting entirely of MSU alumni now located in Los Angeles.
Our brief was to create a 4-7 minute dark comedy/conspiracy short with the following elements: the line “it’s never done that way”, a hypnotherapist, and a food container. We worked around the clock almost non-stop, from Friday night when I wrote the script, shot all day Saturday, edited overnight and into Sunday and worked overnight Sunday on color and music.
Inspired by some of my favorite British mysteries and using the improv talent of the cast, I wrote a script that focuses on when the normal becomes more than normal. All of the clues to each twist and turn are laid out in the very first shot. We borrowed elements of the visual language from filmmakers Christopher Nolan and Sam Esmail and even though the set is simple, we tried to play up the production design by more effectively using the costuming and props.
If you would like to screen this at your film festival, please visit our page on FilmFreeway.