This 18-minute short, directed by Emre Safak, was the first completed film by Olive Barrel Productions, a Boston-area independent film company. Having worked on it myself (in a slew of capacities), it's interesting to see how the product reflects and masks the production techniques of guerrilla film-making. On a budget that was so tight that the screenwriter made sandwich lunches for cast and crew during one shoot, that lighting soft-boxes were constructed piecemeal, and that actors were paid in copy & credit, it sometimes makes me marvel that the film was made at all. (Money was spent where it counted, though--on top-end microphone hardware and editing software).
Mr. Safak, with whom I've collaborated for three scripts, is the type of director who pays meticulous attention to the technical details of a shoot. He prefers to elicit the acting decisions very intuitively, suggesting to his actors what might be going through a character's mind rather than giving an adjective to an emotion or instructing actors which words they should emphasize. As principal editor of the film, he also takes creative control over the tempo of the film and the musical background.
