In late 2014 I was talking with my friend from college and colleague, Daniel Eachus, and he had expressed to me that he wanted to work on a project again. We had collaborated during our senior year on a twelve episode web series and he had acted in my short film Dan: The Man. While I was keen on the idea I was still a bit sensitive to the fact that I had failed to get that short film accepted into any film festivals. I really wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and filmmaker and a festival acceptance was like the holy grail to me at the time. So I agreed but made it clear that my goal was to make it to a festival and we got to work figuring out how best to make that happen.
What we came up with was a list of things that we could do to help set us apart from the rest of the submissions we might be competing against. We knew we didn’t have the technical knowhow or money to be able to make our project look as good as many others but we figured we could be creative enough in our technical approach. I had just recently seen Sean Baker’s film Tangerine, which was shot on iPhone 5 cameras so I knew shooting a theater worthy film on a phone could be done. So that was my first suggestion, let’s shoot it on a phone. The next suggestion that came was arguably even more difficult; we wanted to shoot the whole thing in one take. A true one take, no hidden cuts like Birdman which was only made to look like one take. After those ideas had taken hold Daniel and I got together with our other college friend, Diego Parada, and got to work on a script. We wrote together over a period of a couple months and got a script we were happy with. Next was the time for rehearsal and planning. We needed to know all the movements of the characters in order to best know where the camera would need to be and so we could best communicate with the eventual small crew we would get to help us.
When it came to the tools for the shoot I had the latest phone at the time, the iPhone 6S Plus and figured if the 5 was good enough for Sean, the 6 was good enough for us. I used the same anamorphic lens adapter he did too; a company named Moondog Labs had created a lens that fit over the phone’s native lens and gave you true anamorphic visuals. It was pretty revolutionary at the time; they were pretty much the only game in town. Now there is an entire industry around shooting film on your phone but in 2015 that wasn’t the case. Everything we did had to be jury-rigged. In order to fit the variable ND filter, which we needed to adjust exposure from our outdoor shots to our indoor shots, onto the lens adapter I had a member of the gym I worked at machine us a plastic adapter that allowed us to pressure fit the filter on. We used rubber bands, zip ties, and a small sandbag weight to make the phone heavy enough to work with the gimbal we bought to create our smooth and steady shots. Again, all the gimbals made to work with lighter phones today didn’t exist so we had to make it work for a gimbal that was designed to work with a camera that weighed at least five times heavier.
All of this is to say we made it work. It was a blast to film and we accomplished every goal we had set out for ourselves. We got accepted into three festivals and won best picture at one of them. I hope our passion and effort comes through to you as you watch the film.