Light At The End Of The Rainbow
Cheesy title to start with, why not.Â
Last month saw the release of my 3rd short film entitled ‘Lola’s Rainbow’. It has become an artistic achievement for me. On the surface level it’s my longest short film to date. Not a huge achievement but one none the less. It’s also my best one so far. This is something I’ll cover in more detail later on. What most may not though however is that it’s a massive personal accomplishment as well. This is what I wanted to mostly focus on.
3 Years, 3 short films. 3 increasingly frustrating productions.Â
Starting with Mr Happy. A true passion project. The origins of it are well documented. I watched the pilot for Mr Robot, got inspired (mostly by the cinematography), & decided to attempt to make my first ever short film. I had no expectations. No established standards. I just decided to make something. It turned out to be really successful. I was so pleased with the final product. Then it was released into the world... I could have never predicted the reception. It felt like my coming out party. I was showing the world what I could do at that early point in my art. Moving on to Nevermind, my second short film. I had now established what I could do. The idea was to do something bigger and more ambitious. To prove that I could. Unfortunately I made the drastic mistake of aiming too high. I tried to do too much. I continued to handle basically all of the behind the camera work while taking up a main role in the cast. It’s just not possible. It also quickly became a production hell. Organising & scheduling a cast of 4 proved to be extremely difficult. So difficult that I missed the original release date simply because it was nowhere near complete. It wasn’t released for another two months. Once it was released the reception was lukewarm at best. Nobody seemed to care & this just added to an increasingly dreadful part of my psyche. Now I’m going to explain something before I move onto talking about Lola’s Rainbow. I doubt I’m alone when I say this but as an artist I’m always looking to improve. I never want to stagnate because the moment that happens is the moment when my love for this dies. So imagine how it feels when you can’t get it out of your head that the best thing you’ve ever made was your first film. Something I made with less than half of the skill/experience I have now. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’ve improved since then. But it felt like the evidence wasn’t there. No matter how much I felt I was improving, the validation wasn’t there. As I’ve previously mentioned the reception to Mr Happy was amazing. However I never repeated that. No matter what I made, I never got close to it. You have to understand how much that eats me up inside as an artist. I started questioning whether I was actually improving. Whether I was good at what I do. Whether it was worth continuing to do this. Not a healthy mindset to be in. Short film number 3. Which would come to be known as Lola’s Rainbow. Wanna know my process for this? Prove that I am good. Prove that I have gotten better. Prove that Mr Happy wasn’t a fluke. Really not the mindset any artist should be in when they make shit. But that’s where I found myself. So i set out on making the most ambitious project I could but remembered my mistakes from Nevermind. My goal was to remain behind the camera so I could focus on it. Admittedly I ended up in front of the camera for part of it, but for a brief enough amount of time not to be a big issue. This was a project that started with the end. Which was originally much darker than what it eventually changed to. Literally all of my projects seem to start with an idea for a shot/scene, then I go from there. Anyway once again this turned into production hell. For different reasons though. While I still had to schedule with the same cast, this was less of a pain as we didn’t all have to be there at once. No it turned into hell because of the mindfuck that was organising it. Shooting with the intent of telling a story over a continuous set of days is a pain in the ass. Especially when you’re telling a similar story each day. There’s also my mindset issue. I hit rock bottom during production. Mentally I was done. Checked out. Considering saying fuck it and giving up all of this. I have a bit of a perfectionist’s attitude, not as bad as most though. My attitude makes it so that if I think i can’t do something as well as I want to, it’s hard to bring myself to do it at all. So imagine being at rock bottom with this attitude. Literally every time I shot something during this period I couldn’t look at the footage for awhile. And when I did look all I could think was ‘this is all shit’. Fortunately I managed to get out from rock bottom and kept pushing through. Eventually it came to the edit and I realised that I’ve actually done a pretty damn good job. While finalising the edit I began worrying about audience reaction. I was worried it wasn’t going to be the most accessible film. I stuck to my guns though. Fortunately it paid off for me. The reception has been fucking marvellous and it put me on cloud 9. Knowing that I’ve finally bested Mr Happy has taken a weight off my mind. So yes as stated it earlier it’s an artist achievement but now you know why it’s so much more to me. So thank you. Thank you for being a part of that.