In the spring of 2014, I caught wind of a short film challenge being hosted by RØDE microphones.  There wasn’t a whole lot of time left to submit, but I had a concept for a film in mind–one that I developed over the course of the following week.  With a mere week left to submit, I called up my cousin Chris and told him, “We need to find two actors, we’re shooting a short in three days.”  Well five days and a RØDE microphone rental later, we got to work.  We filmed the whole thing in a single day and used every ounce of daylight we had and then some but at the end of that crazy day, after all the malfunctions, waiting for batteries to recharge, and convincing a police officer that we were shooting a short film, not doing anything illegal, we got everything we needed.  I spent the next day madly editing this film and the accompanying behind-the-scenes footage that was required for the contest. It wasn’t the greatest thing I’d ever made, but it felt good to get a product completed.  Then the inevitable happened of course: “file corrupted”.  I had to start over, and did not get it done in time.  It was disappointing to say the least, but RØDE continued to hold the contest and choose a winner in spite of our film’s absence.  Apparently the event as a whole went well because RØDE has continued it in 2015 and again this year of 2016, with increasingly awesome prizes for the winners.

Now we’re hitting up the contest again and this time we’re prepared.  My same cousin Chris has been working on a script for a short for the past several months and in the time since we last entered we’ve gained a lot of experience and a little bit of money, so I’m very excited to see what we can do.  Now, four months of script development, five weeks of production design, four weeks of budgeting, three weeks of story boarding, two weeks of auditioning and crew building, one professional actor, and a whole lot of drooling over the top prizes later, we’re almost ready to begin principle photography on our “My RØDE Reel 2016” entry, Intruder.

Check back here periodically over the next few weeks as I update you on our progress.

If you haven’t seen our most recent short film from the 24/ONE Challenge hosted by the Edmonton International Film Festival yet, go on and check that out in the meantime!

-Nick