Originally, I came up with two one-minute short film ideas the day before I presented them. They were both good ideas and choosing between them became a dilemma. I tried eliminating one by assessing feasibility, but they were both very doable. The key to the dilemma was to mix them. That’s how I developed Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees.

 I finished the two-paged script the day we shot. We shot for about four hours. Filming took much longer than I planned because of one main problem. My photographer is below average height and I am above average height. With me as an actor, this made some shots impossible for her to do because the tripod was too tall when leveled with me. She could not see the screen of the camera, so the other actor and I had to frame the shot (meaning one of the actors was always out of the shot because he was the one framing it). This guessing soaked up a lot of time and didn’t always work.

There was less than a page of dialogue in the script, but that turned out to be a minute long itself in film. In post, I ended up cutting out over an entire minute of shots that surrounded the dialogue in order to keep the film under a minute. The story was not really affected, thankfully, but the short film does have a different feel. In its one-minute form, it feels more like a message to the audience than an experience.

I would take a different approach if I could do the project again. I believe that experiencing these problems first hand is the only way to become better at predicting them. The final one-minute film could have been shot in a half hour had I foreseen the issues I experienced.  There would be more time to invest and the time spent would be spent on footage that would actually be used. That said, there was enough planning and work put in to still produce a decent one-minute film.