Recently, I had the opportunity of meeting and socializing with a group of post-production professionals (say that three times fast) here in Albuquerque. I found the entire experience both nerve-racking and exciting for a multitude of reasons, but something that really had an impact on me was being asked over and over if I had an “editor’s reel.” I didn’t, so when I got home that night, I began putting together a short compilation of all my video work up to that point. Putting together a reel of your work is like taking a trip down memory lane. Some of it was fun, some of it was horrifying, and all of it was a good reminder that I am actually progressing as an artist. One of the pieces that I looked at, but didn’t actually include in my reel, was my very first short film: Double Stuffed. I know that sounds like a porn title; I was 16, I didn’t know any better. I have seen this film more times than I can probably count. I know the cliche is to hate one’s first attempts at filmmaking; oftentimes they are described as “cringey” and “hard to watch.” Sure, a lot of this is true for my first foray into movie making, I don’t deny that. However, I find so much joy in my little creation, that I cannot help revisiting it time and time again. If you haven’t seen it (and you probably haven’t), Double Stuffed is a short film that I made with my friends and classmates when I was a junior in high school. The idea for the film was conceived as a parody of the 1941 Billy Wilder film Double Indemnity. When you watch them back to back, my little black-and-white romp starts to make a lot more sense (although not much more). Essentially, the plot follows Nabisco (ha), an insurance agent working for the “Cream Supply Company.” Her entire life gets turned upside when a meeting with one of her client’s husband, a Mr. Value (ha), becomes a twisted plan to commit murder and collect the insurance money.
What I don’t often talk about is the fact that I made the film for a class I was taking at the time. It was a film history class of sorts, and the final assignment for the course was to create a short parody of one of the films we viewed in class. I had always had Double Indemnity in mind, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I can’t exactly remember what spurned the overall plan for the script, but I distinctly remember thinking it would be funny to gender swap the roles, as a way of playing with the outright chauvinism on display in the original film. I didn’t actually take any on-screen roles in this film - I directed the entire affair and edited it in Windows’ Movie Maker. The entire “production” went exactly as most student films go. We worked on a budget of Little Ceasar’s pizza, with the only time to shoot being after school and before dinner time. We had a total of four actors - two leads, one supporting, and one “extra.” What still makes me laugh to this day is the way we used our “extra.” He played every role we couldn’t fill in the background - a pool player, a butler, a bartender, etc. We even extended this joke into the credits, where we gave him an individual credit for each role he played. That, ultimately, is why I think it still makes me smile when I watch my first film. I am still amazed at the ways in which we chose to take our limitations and use them to our advantage. Every moment of limitation was turned into a running gag or a clever joke. I love, for instance, how we couldn’t afford to actually hit someone with a car (there was no budget for stunts), so I just had my actor drive very slowly towards the camera, and then in the editing I just cut to black and added a very dramatic crash noise. It’s so obviously fake and over the top that I think it still lands as a joke (but maybe that’s just because I wrote it). I think it’s always a good idea to re-visit one’s work and see what lessons can be learned from them. Maybe they aren’t perfect, but there’s a spirit to my first few films that I admire. I didn’t care about how I made my films, only that I was having fun making them.
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