Despair Short Film

Playing Dress-up

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I had wanted to do a short film for years before I finally got the chance. The idea to have the concept of despair be the villain came from me thinking about weight loss. You see all these ads for programs that promise to slim you down, but they carry themselves with language that suggests weight loss is an event, a thing that you do one time. Anyone that's ever tried it, knows that it's a lifestyle. You have to keep at it permanently if you want to stay on top of it. A lot of times in movies the hero fixes his problem over the course of the film, and that's it. He's now confident, or over the death of his old mentor, or finally able to eat fish. I began to think that most of life's real problems are more of a lifestyle fix, like weight loss, and imagined what that sort of monster would be like.

This was one of those situations where all the right people lined up together at the right time. A friend of mine has a workshop out of his garage, and he figured out how to build the lightsabers out of polycarbonate, stuff them with LEDs, and power them with USB battery packs in the hilt. It was important to me that the swords functioned as actual light sources, rather than just do them digitally. Another friend had been working on her makeup skills, and wanted to experiment with some horror stuff. We were all sci-fi people, and something in the vein of Star Wars seemed like a perfect fit.

We had access to a filming location, but for story reasons we had to shoot at night. We got everything over two nights, recording from around 8:00 to 1:00. I had a cameraman and a pair of assistants, but past that it was just me and the other actor. I had to do the fight choreography and acting, while I was trying to direct the whole affair. It was exhausting, and I was excited, and scared, and stressed to be doing my first short film, but I had the time of of life doing it.

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Editing

I spent about three solid weeks editing and doing the visual effects. For the sound effects, I read up on how they produced the media on the original Star Wars and did my best to duplicate them. For the sword hums, I got some audio of power transformers and modulated the pitch. I played the sound back, and recorded it while swinging a mic around to create a doppler effect for the sword swings. The gunshots were a mixture of actual firearm sounds, and a laser sound made by attaching a Slinky to a Styrofoam cup.

Most of the visual effects had to do with enhancing the swords. Making their glows more pronounced, adding some flashes when they touched. I also had to paint out some shots where the cameraman was visible in reflections, or hiding and revealing the prop swords as they turned off and on.

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“I was excited, and scared, and stressed to be doing my first short film, but I had the time of my life doing it.”

Looking back

There was about a hundred things I would do differently if I were to do it again, but I'm so happy with what we produced. I'd love to more shorts in the future.

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