Sifting

When I learned that Leonard also wanted to be a filmmaker it should have been one if those aha moments in life. Instead it was more like "Oh so you wanted to make movies? I was here first."
At the time Leonard was enrolled in a production class over at FIU. He had access to some video equipment and I came along to help him out on his class project. It was a multi angle shot of a tennis serve. We would from then on pad our film credits and refer to it as The tennis movie. But it was hardly a movie. But a B+ grade in a class I wasn't even enrolled in.

We then decided to tackle our very own film short. We had very limited funds and zero access to locations. So I wrote a script with that in mind. I wrote Sifting. The title lifted from a Nirvana song, it was less a short movie and more a long monologue. Assisting us on this project was Eric our long time friend. We used his house as our base of operations and decided to shoot on location near his home.

I never felt like I had full support of my crew on the script. Perhaps it wasn't perfect, but no one else had written anything, so we went full speed ahead on 'Sifting'

We storyboarded the entire project. Not in a way where we were visualizing our shots. But just to layout how everything was going to be shot. Not one if us could draw, but that wasn't the problem with storyboards. They played out like a comic book adaptation of a stage play.

The fighting began shortly thereafter. I had an idea of how the film played in my head. Leonard just wanted to shoot it like a television commercial. His teacher had taught him to avoid all the gimmicky camera angles.
I was trying to explain there was a differrence between gimmicks and style.

The script revolved around a fictionalized version of Eric and a fictional friend named Fogerty who was an amalgamized version of Leonard and I. He was the best and the worst of us and he is much much cooler than the both of us.

Eric had been tapped to play Eric. But we needed our Fogerty. I felt unable to play the character and Leonard then volunteered to play him. This also didn't mesh well with my vision of the character.

There was a third character in the script called Angry Motorist. I always figured we'd get Eric's father to play this character. Eric didn't feel like asking his dad, so Leonard too volunteered to play this character. Which meant he would essentially be talking to himself the while movie.

Every objection I raised, was quickly shut down with the simple reasoning that I was only the writer. And the vision of the film belonged solely to the Director. Which of course was Leonard.

But still I was ecstatic to be shooting my very first film soon. I was told the date was fast approaching.

And one day I recieved a phone call from Leonard.

"Hey I got the camera! Are you ready to shoot?"

I sat quiet on the other end of my the phone. Then I responded. "I'm at the Warped Tour"

Leonard had assumed I would be available at any time and failed to divulge his plan. His inability to keep others in the loop Is one of his biggest faults to this day. He graduated his production class and took a job working for Channel 7.

Now not only did we not have a camera but we also were short on something else: Time.

And just like that the dream had died.