Shredded and Torn Part 2
Honestly, we are a little insane for making a feature film but it's worth every moment.
After asking, and asking, and asking, Adam finally said “Yes!” (Tangled-reference for those of you less-versed in Disney films). Before reading Part 2, if you missed Part 1, you can read it here for context and the full journey. For the one sentence summary, Adam and I bonded over our shared shoulder surgery trauma, and when found out that his shoulder issues were due to breast cancer, and the diagnosis changing the trajectory of his life, I felt deep in my soul like we needed to make something. My life flipped upside down (literally, I did flips and landed upside down) when I fell down the Manhattan Bridge on my bicycle and woke up in an ambulance. As a professional dancer that fully relies on my body for my career, this accident was devastating.
At the time, I kept scouring YouTube and films that I could relate to in the deep despair of my depression. I kept feeling like, if I could see an athlete or dancer who had gone through a tragedy, come out on the other side and not hate their life, maybe I could get through this. There are some inspirational athlete films of enduring hardship, but I felt like all the films I watched glossed over what the hard part was - despair, never knowing if you will recover, knowing your life is forever changed, the day in and day out of feeling hopeless - and skipped to the part where they worked really hard and managed a comeback.
The more I travelled down the road to recovery, the more I felt isolated and alone, watching all of my friends book Broadway shows and moving on with their lives, while I quite literally felt stuck. In a last ditch effort, I stumbled upon a “Fit For Broadway” article interviewing a woman named “Marisa Merliss” who had survived both being dropped on a cruise ship, shattering her ankle and spine, requiring 5 surgeries. After recovering from that, she was attacked at a bus stop in Central Park, and beaten and left for dead. Both of those experiences were years of recovery, and as a dancer, devastating. In a last ditch effort to not give up on myself, I emailed her, and she immediately responded offering for me to come to a “Melt Class” for free. Melt was life-changing for my recovery, but having someone I could look up to that had been through it and understood exactly how I was feeling, was quite honestly how I didn’t give up.
Why am I sharing all of this? We recover faster and better in community, especially when someone understands us. It’s so easy to say “God has a plan” and “You’ll get better someday” without truly sitting with someone and listening, and sitting with all of their feelings and empathy. I felt like I did not have permission to grieve the loss of my self, my life, and everything lost, but I was supposed to be focused on “staying positive” and “God has a bigger plan”. Sometimes life just sucks, and you need to feel your way through it, all while having selfless love, compassion, and understanding from those around you, and also someone who knows what it is like to walk in those shoes.
Adam and I had multiple conversations about being in the depths of despair, the moments that changed everything, the people we met along the way, and how we wanted the film to reach and connect. Grief hits you like a wave, sometimes in the most unexpected moments, and you feel like you are drowning, and feel the pull of the wave on top of you like you cannot swim up.
After many of these conversations - my experience with Marisa, meeting a dancing wheel-chair user, and volunteering for children’s oncology parties - and Adam’s experience of seeing a man die getting chemo at the same time, going into surgery to remove a breast, and receptionists asking if he was there to “support his mom/sister/partner going through breast cancer” and being told the breast cancer support group was for “women only” - we finally agreed that not only were we going to make a film about it, we had to make a film.
Surfing changed my life, and how I viewed life. The first two times I went on vacation somewhere that I could surf, I wasn’t able to because of my injuries. I would sit for hours and watch others surf. When I finally had the opportunity to surf for the first time, when I got stuck in Costa Rica in 2021, I was hooked. Surfing is a beautiful metaphor for life, recovery, and the flow of the ocean and water is healing. When I moved back to New York City briefly in 2021/2022, I moved to Rockaway Beach just outside of the city so that I could spend more time surfing, and less time locked in my apartment. Surfing has helped me through the highs of making films and pursuing this career, keeping me grounded, and also the lows of reminding me that there will always be another wave to surf.
From the time we said yes to let’s make this, in October of 2022, we set a goal to either film in May of 2023 (crazy I know) or September of 2023. While I was splitting my time between New York City and Vancouver by this point, I planned to keep my apartment at least through the following summer, but since summer is the high season of Rockaway, we knew it would be too difficult to film. Adam had come to film a short at my apartment in September of 2022, and when we went down to the tiki bar for our post-filming dinner, the owner of the tiki bar came over and said we could film there sometime as long as it wasn’t June-August. My partner had been working at the tiki bar the whole summer, and was everyone’s favorite surfer since he takes the tropical drinks and tiki culture very seriously (don’t remind me how many tiki mugs he has).
*Amazing tiki bar called Rockaway Tiki in Rockaway Beach, NYC (Beach 67th station)
We worked backwards from a plan to film in May, as we had also begun reading about the strong possibility for a WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. We would be ok if WGA went on strike, but depending on who we cast, SAG-AFTRA could have interrupted filming depending on how long strikes went on. We needed to have the script complete by December, so we could move to next steps of budgets, pitch deck complete, a plan for funding, locations, cast and crew, and learning the lines/planning the film.
Frustrated with auditioning, I wanted to create more and show the industry that I could lead a film. In this process, it was important to me that I would keep the ability and opportunity to be a lead in Shredded. Starting in September, I was taking a producing course, which was incredibly helpful to learning how to produce, and being able to take my weekly challenges to an experienced producer in the business, to work through those challenges and develop new ideas. Everything from how to talk with investors, types of investing, how to set-up business structures, attach cast, etc was covered and incredibly helpful while going through the process. DREASIS :)
We met a few times a week to finish outlining the story, different possibilities for the story, and Adam would go away to write for a bit, and I would come back in and edit and change things. I wrote some chunks of dialogue. While the initial writing was difficult with such personal subject matter, once we found the flow, the script came together with ease, and after sending it to mentors and colleagues, we had a lot of amazing feedback.
With a limited amount of time to raise capital, we kept a few things in mind when writing the script, thanks to Noam Kroll’s micro-budget filmmaking course:
Limit the characters - The more characters you write into your script, the more people you have to cast, pay, feed, travel, etc. Our script primarily revolves around 2 main characters, a few supporting characters (2-3 days on set each), and limited group/crowd scenes.
Write with locations you have - We knew we had the tiki bar, so we wrote scenes in the tiki bar (which was amazing set dec by the way!). In public places in New York City, you do not need a permit to film if the camera is hand-held or sticks, and you are not blocking off any streets. With that, we wrote a variety of beach scenes, and outside locations around Rockaway that we would not need permits. We had an actor friend that owned a doctor’s office we could utilize, and another friend that worked for a theatre. We were able to utilize a coffee shop for the cost of the employees being there to make sure no one set the place on fire. With production insurance, sometimes people will allow you to film at a discount/free if they know you are a low-budget film.
Limit the length - The longer the script, the more days you need to film and the more expensive the days get with crew and cast. Our script was 80 pages (though we had so much coverage, the film ended up being 1:45:00) and we were able to limit the length of the pages by keeping the story to one week. Capturing everything we spoke about on our journey to recovery over the course of years in a week, was a challenge, but that’s why we set it in a surf camp!
Great dialogue is key - When you are working on the micro-budget scale, action has to be strategic and integral, and dialogue must be excellent. We had a cast read-through of the dialogue to make any tweaks needed before filming and asked for feedback from others and the cast from that table read.
From there, the true work of producing began of developing the script, reaching out to investors from film commission meetings and mutual connections, developing the pitch deck, and finally agreeing and developing an IndieGo crowd-funding campaign to capture anything we missed. I’ll touch more on crowd-funding, investment, and pre-production choices we made to keep costs under wraps in the next part. If you have any questions about making your first feature film, filming or writing, acting, etc please leave a comment! It would mean a lot to us if you share this with someone who is working on their first feature film, or starting their filming journey!
PS - I will be releasing my novel to paid subscribers (but all free subscribers will receive the prologue and a few chapters for free) towards the end of the summer. If you are willing to share my writing with someone who you think would resonate, that would mean so much to me!
PPS - We have upcoming screenings on August 14th, 2024 at Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland, OH with a Q&A after the screening. Tickets are limited and only $12!