Merry Christmas. If you’re reading this, that means my new short film “YOU & MIRA” is out now! It’s about an abandoned teenage girl building a friendship with her dad’s old camcorder, and making an unlikely connection through a radio. You can watch it below:

This blog post is the first of two parts in the several months-long process of creating the film: from pre-production, the dozens of drafts our script went through, finding a cast and crew, to our rehearsal.
Along the way, you might get a feel for what it’s like to plan an apocalyptic found footage short film while running on fumes during finals season...!

PRE-PRE-PRODUCTION

So, this film was the final project for my Directing for Film class. We were assigned to write and produce a five minute short film, restricted to one location with two characters and a simple premise. My co-director, Tanner, pitched his ideas for a short, and I pitched mine. In hindsight, I’m really glad we chose YOU & MIRA’s pitch. The others were definitely not as... thought out.

My first one was a satire about a pathetic student falling in love with her AI Assistant, revealing more details of her life to it until she’s caught turning in an entirely AI generated thesis paper. The bulk of the film would’ve been a scene between her and her pissed off professor, debating the reality of her lover's sentience and the dangers of oversharing with AI platforms.

I think Tanner’s other idea was about an actor on set for the Elvis movie becoming possessed by Elvis’s ghost, and uncontrollably spiraling into Elvis-like insanity? Maybe we should have gone with that.

This was Tanner's other idea above... It may look familiar to you. Although, we ditched the coming-of-age "finding yourself" part of it. The origins of this idea were a lot more lighthearted than the film ended up being... He pictured a lot more goofy and dorky moments, opening the film with the main character holding up hand-written cardboard title cards. Once we got the ball rolling and started brainstorming ideas for scenes though, we began toying with the idea of someone contacting the main character through their radio.
Below is what we wrote for Mira's pre-established circumstances. Just for the story's sake, lets just say none of these documents are canon to the YOU & MIRA cinematic universe.

SCRIPT: ROUGH & FINAL DRAFT

We had around two weeks to write a rough draft of the script, and the first and second try were kind of rough! There was a lot of extra expository dialogue, like Mira saying what she was feeling out loud. This project was a good way for me to work towards breaking out of that habit.

We cut two scenes that read more like a self-interview about Mira’s life rather than someone that was actually emotionally going through something. Overall, though... we had TOO MUCH script. There were enough ideas to make a half-feature film because we couldn’t stop coming up with sadder and sadder ideas, but we eventually settled with our four strongest scenes. Here's our finished loose outline:

We went through three different versions before finalizing our rough draft, which we showed to our class for it to be critiqued. Each of our classmates had unique insights on the rough draft, and gave us pretty useful notes. Someone wanted to see how Mira physically dealt with her loneliness, rather than just having her talking about it. Someone else pointed out that Scavenger was introduced too late, (around page four) and the general consensus was that we needed to move the radio scene no later than two pages in, (which we immediately did.)

Photo taken by Roman Madrigal

Our professor’s biggest and most influential note was that the camera should be Mira’s only friend. Tying into our main theme of loneliness, he wanted more conflict regarding Mira’s solitude. He also joked that we can all relate to Mira in some way since we all went through the COVID lockdown, and Tanner and I realized that quarantine was subconsciously the inspiration for Mira’s circumstances. (Yay!) And, although we didn’t go with it, he also suggested that we try a revision where Mira destroys the camera at the end. We actually drafted an epilogue scene for after when the film ends now, where Mira destroys the camera. Ultimately, we decided it was maybe too depressing, and the temporary dialogue in it felt unsalvageable to me...

One week after the in-class critique, our final draft and lookbook was due. Tanner came over to my apartment for the first time to make the lookbook. We assembled inspiration photos, character facts and our visual approach for around 40% of the hangout. The other 60% were spent eating pizza and trying to figure out a title for the film... We were between a couple dozen at one point. (With some more serious than others)

A couple days later, the final draft of our script was due. We stayed at the library from 2PM to 9PM finishing it. We also completed the shot list and put out the casting call that night. This also meant that we had to have our shoot day cemented...?! We knew that we wouldn’t be able to edit over Thanksgiving break, so we decided on two weeks before it. (Nov. 15th & 16th)

Me & Tanner at the library finishing up the script the night before...

Speaking of the final draft... if YOU (the reader at home) want to get your hands on our script and lookbook, it’s available here in my shop. Think of it like giving me a tip, except you get to read a PDF for free instead. ($1)

ACTUAL PRE-PRODUCTION

My biggest mistake with planning this film was taking too long creating and posting the crew & casting call. I knew that I wanted it to be posted ONLY when we were absolutely confident in both our script and our shoot days, but I also wanted the post itself to look pretty. The week I was originally planning on posting the crew / casting call happened to be Halloweekend and... for some strange reason I wasn’t sober or conscious enough then to create the post. (weird.) It ended up being posted on November 6th, leaving us around nine days to assemble a cast & crew. (Not enough time, especially at this time of the semester...) Most of my peers were already committed to other sets that weekend, and senior thesis films were building their huge crews at the same time.

Okay, so I don’t really wanna sugarcoat and pretend like I was feeling amazingly confident at every stage of this film’s production. Well, actually, maybe Tanner was... but I was really worried that we weren’t gonna be able build a crew in time. After I posted the crew call, there was a handful of people that reached out to me initially, but most of them ran into scheduling conflicts or had to back out as our shoot day drew closer.

We discovered that mid-November was a terrible time to schedule a film, especially this short-notice. Not only was this part of the semester the most stressful assignment-wise, but EVERYONE AND THEIR MOMMAS was booked for other sets or personal projects. We absolutely should have put that shit out in October. 😭

From what I’ve seen, the way these sets kind of always play out is near the end there’s a couple friends & stragglers that fill out the rest of your pending positions. We were really lucky to find the people we did in the days leading up to my set! Many of them were brought on board for one position, but ended up fulfilling multiple roles on-set. Which isn’t uncommon, but also isn't good! We should each only need to wear one hat instead of multiple at once! My big ass head hurts from how many hats we were forced to wear! I’m lucky they didn’t sue me for neck injuries!!!

We did need certain roles to be fulfilled that ultimately ended up empty, though. A producer would’ve aided the film to secure a proper location rather than having to dress my living room, and a designated set decorator would’ve helped dress the space a little better. (Cobwebs, wooden boards on the window, etc.) There’s definitely an alternate universe where we shot this in an actual bomb shelter. Which would’ve been nice, since our upstairs neighbors like to tap-dance.

CASTING

Casting was a completely different experience. Tanner knew how to put out a casting call announcement through our university’s email, (Meaning that our casting call was sent to EVERY acting/theatre major.) We had a surprising amount of actresses send in headshots, resumes, and self-tapes. We’re really grateful for just how many people reached out, and I’ve never felt so overwhelmed by talent... But, the actresses we chose were the ones who we saw playing Mira and Scavenger the best! We sat together and watched each one, and with Cadence and Jasmine, we both kinda had a gut feeling after their respective audition-tapes. We reached out to let them know they were casted, and scheduled a rehearsal for the day before shooting.

The only photo I took during our rehearsal day, because I didn't want to look like a weirdo freak taking photos of people I had just met. (I actually just forgot)

REHEARSAL

So, one of the biggest concerns leading up to our shoot was fully knowing that we had a fight scene at the end of our script. Although written to be slightly off-screen, we still wanted to show the start of the fight and end with Mira swinging the shovel at Scavenger’s head. After a discussion with our professor, he insisted that (in order for him to sleep at night,) we NEEDED a stunt coordinator on set to block and ensure our actresses safety. We had multiple stunt coordinators with scheduling issues, but we can’t really blame anyone for that. It was getting to be extremely late notice, and we were doing nothing but burning time at that point. A coordinator with an unpredictable schedule wasn’t ideal when their job is ensuring talent safety, so I don’t blame anyone we reached out to for cancelling or anything. By our rehearsal, we had reached out to five stunt coordinators with no luck. So, we decided to cut the on-screen fight and try to find another solution that still had the same emotional weight. That decision was made in the final days leading up to the rehearsal...

Our actresses arrived at a rented studio space the Friday evening before our shoot day. Once we broke the ice, we started diving into character motivation and cleared up any other questions they had. After, we ran through each scene one by one, asking them to mime their props and imagine the set around them. The only physical thing they had to mess with was the radio, the camcorder, and a plastic bloody shovel. We gave them some notes, and directed several different ways each scene could go. After three hours of running through everything, we called it and slept extra early that night for our shoot day bright and early the next morning.

TO BE CONTINUED...

You may have noticed this blog post is starting to run on long as hell. Because of that, I’ve decided to cut it in half and come back later with a second post continuing where we’re leaving off now. I really encourage you to watch YOU & MIRA if you haven’t already, because the next blog post will cover the two shoot days and spoil everything much more than this one already has !!

Thank you for reading this GIGOEWORLD broadcast, and have a happy holiday and a happy new year as well... if you want. Visit here for links related to YOU & MIRA, and check out the GIGOESTUDIOS instagram for news and cool pictures.

A CONNECTION.