"Leave Me" short (HVX w/Brevis)

Ryan Dunlap

Ryan Dunlap

Member
Hey everyone, Brandon just encouraged me to post a short I did for the same competition he entered A Dim Light into. Well, technically I didn't direct this one... I was planning to but due to some schedule mishaps, I moved from directing to acting and my co-writer came in a directed last second so I didn't have to go crazy both directing and acting for a 36 hour competition.

The competition came up a week after we wrapped on our feature, Greyscale, and the crew wanted to keep going (I love my crew), so we entered the 36 hour competition.

Out of a field of 66, we were fortunate enough to have tugged on the judges' heartstrings enough to come out on top. We've since used the prize money to enter the extended version into 8 film fests (Sundance, Hollywood, NYC Shorts, St. Louis, London United, IndieProducer, Slamdance, and Mammoth), so we'll see how that goes.

A week after we won, we went out and reshot the ending and the opening sequence because they felt a bit rushed, and now we have our 4 minute version.

Anyway, here it is:

Leave Me - Extended 4 Minute version: http://vimeo.com/4220803

-Ryan

P.S. Here's a couple behind the scenes pictures:
 

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I remember seeing this during the viewing of the 36 hour competition entries ... it was a great short, with a simple, charming story that really fit the time constraints well. One of the problems we often see in our fests here is that people try to tell a story that is larger than the time limit .. .but this story fits the time requirement well.

Great little film ... anxious to pull up the "extended" version and see how the final version turned out.

Great job on this guys, and congrats on the win. Good luck in the festivals :thumbsup:
 
The one thing I'm learning is incredibly frustrating about having 2 versions of something... people stop weighing whether they liked it, and instead pick which version they liked better. All of the sudden we're competing against ourselves...

-Ryan
 
This was VERY well done. The acting was excellent and the story was great. I like the extended cut best. I will show this to a lot of people because it has power. -Matt
 
Thanks Matt! Really appreciate that!

Yeah Brandon, I thought about taking it down, but eventually decided against it. I can live with the minor annoyance anyway. :)
 
Not enough people utilize the power of film like this. I love how you created your own world without cheapening it through explanation, and told the story in a straightforward manner—both in terms of pacing and cinematography. You are also lucky to have had such emotive actors at your disposal (including yourself!).

My only suggestion is a very nitpicky one, and that would be that, in the camera-world, it perhaps does not make sense to have the camera in it, as it could not take a picture of itself.* Also, when your character raises his hand to the sky, does that imply that his wife would have been in the sky? Since in the previous photo, the couple clearly point to where she’s standing. And why is she present at the sunset but not where they are? I realize there is no time to think about these things in the span of 36 hours, but they just stuck out to me.

*Although I suppose by the same token, neither would it make sense to have the wife there as well—which would significantly alter the piece. But it maybe would have been interesting if the main character instead learned something about her through her work, or was inspired to do something to carry it on for her. But I do like the ending you have so I could go either way on that.
 
The "ruleset" was that people in the picture are in the world, but not the person taking the photo. This was the one picture that Jack took of Amy, (the bridge picture that he tells his dad to go to), and so when we finally get to that picture, the rules change slightly since Jack is now in the picture he took, and thus in the place where he was when the photo was taken.

It's probably an exception to the rules, and the first cut of the short didn't have him holding the camera, but I see it mostly as a non-issue, since it's not like snapping the photo will somehow get him or Amy out of the picture.

(side note, the two guys are Amy's brothers... we had to cut their dialog talking about how they wanted to kill their sister for taking so many pictures, and the money that one of them is holding was the bribe money one was giving the other to break the camera later... all cut for time)
 
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