The inevitable origin story

Of misfires, gave-ups and the pile of lost hopes.

If I open any box, closet, folder or container in my apartment at random, I am almost 100% sure to find something about a past project that I once upon a time got excited about, worked on it for a while and then for a reason or another I let it go, forgot about it and moved on. The devastating thing is that most of them contain a good idea or two and reading them fills me with feelings of “aww shit, I should have just persisted and finished this”.

Often my projects would spiral out of control in the ideation phase and by the time I managed to get something on paper the scope of the film was usually gigantic and just reading it would be a major exercise in demoralising feelings. And as no budget friendly “character driven story set in one room”-type-of-ideas managed to materialise, I kept on putting story after story into the pile of lost hopes.

So what’s different this time around? How am I now on the edge of actually producing something and on top of that, even blogging publicly about it?

To answer that, we have to rewind back about three years to a turning point of a discussion that I had with my best friend which went more or less like this:

Somehow that was all that was needed, a little push from someone very close to me. And just like that, off I went into writing a new project with the decision that I would keep on hacking at it until something came out.

Repeating old mistakes

This wouldn’t be much of a growth story if I didn’t spend the next year writing and tinkering on a story that would end up straight into the pile with my other scripts that proved to be much more ambitious than my means.

The film would have told about a young widow during a WWII’esque war who recently lost her sailor husband to the sea and starts seeing frightening visions as the enemy forces approach her home island. A psychological suspense story with some Lovecraftian tones (according to my brother as to my shame I’ve never read any Lovecraft). So far so good, except until you pay closer attention to the details in the script which would have required locations that are not available in Finland, creature effects, period clothing and everything else required to creating the world of the film. Shooting abroad would have required flights, hotels, car rental, possibly even shooting permits.

Pile of lost hopes it is then.

Once more unto the breach!

After scrapping yet another story I was left with a clean table and a blank page. This time I chose to listen the advice given pretty much everyone from seasoned professionals to aspiring filmmakers: “Take stock of what you have available, locations, props, people, and make film with those.”

This was so obvious and it was not the first time I’ve heard it but previously my reaction had been “easy for you to say as you live in California/other-cool-place and have access to all the amazing and cinematic locations, props and people that I could not even imagine having”. But in hindsight I was just blind to what I had around and needed to develop an eye and mind for seeing things differently.

Another hindsight: if after each finishing each of the scrapped stories I would have just sat down to work out the story to a more manageable scope and researched and tested how to pull it off I probably would have gotten something out by now

In the end it was a pretty random task that my dad asked me to help with that triggered my imagination. It was around Christmas time 2016 that he asked me to accompany him to carry out some logs from the forest that were too heavy to lift up alone. By the time we got there it was pitch black dark so we had these LED lights strapped on our heads.

As I was walking around the dark forest, illuminating the path before me with this beam of light an inspiration struck me. If done with an exciting story and some thoughtful cinematography, this could be something special! I picked up my iPhone and shot some material to test the look and it made me even more confident. The LEDs would provide strong enough light, and the modern digital cameras with the right lens could expose a usable image. And to make a dark forest feel more exciting than a pretty regular South-Savonian spruce forest of the reality, I would fill it with sound to make it seem otherworldly.

Darkness, light, the forest and the sounds, one location and only a few characters. I had found my elements and a limited scope to write my story around.

Next December, it will be three years since I went to that forest with dad, by that time I should have a rough cut in my hands. It has taken longer than I would have liked to take for a short film but I hope it is the journey that makes us worthy of crossing the finishing line in the end.