I took a film making class as a way to pass the time and get a little practical experience with film making. Plus, cameras cost like five grand.
The whole production was basically run by the students with the professor doing directing and cat herding. Everyone who wanted to submit a script could, and the favorite became the basis for the film we made.
There were eight students in the class, the script couldn't be longer than eleven pages, and every student had to have a part. No seriously.
I spent a solid week trying to figure out how to write something that could be coherent when there was almost a character per page that had to be supported. What I came up with was a metaphysical sci-fi action thriller. The complex plot and challenging roles provided a lot of meat and grist to chew on for the student actors, and I was certain I had a winner on my hands.
We voted as a class on which script to shoot, and as the professor tallied the votes...the script with cops and robbers won.
We tried to read the script in class after it had been selected, honest we did, but it was completely unreadable. There wasn't any standard formatting, characters were misnamed, entire plots were dropped mid-sentence.
The professor asked why the class chose that script, and the general consensus was, "I wanted to play a cop."
For what it's worth, I voted for my script.
Ultimately, the professor said we had to rewrite it if we had any chance of shooting it, and I volunteered to take a stab at it.
He said, "Great! Get it to me by tomorrow night. We start shooting this weekend."
I said, "Uh..."
I went home and didn't leave my desk until I had a cops and robbers script that featured eight characters in eleven pages, could be shot on the University of Washington campus over two weekends, and had to at least pay basic attention to the plot outlined in the original story.
I am proud to say that I accomplished that task, and that's what we shot.
Bonus Feature: The professor was extremely sick one of the shooting days and could barely stand up, much less point a camera, so I ended up directing a non-trivial amount of the movie! That was incredibly fun. I won't tell you which scenes I shot, because personally, I don't think you can tell.
Here is the script for Shoot Straight as I wrote it. The movie (embedded below) is slightly different. Personally, I prefer my characterizations, but I'll let you be the judge.
More Bonus Features: Here is the script for the sci-fi epic that I wrote that no one understood and didn't feature cops or robbers. It's called Currents of Entropy.
I teased a lot in this post, but I had the best time working with everyone involved with this short. The enthusiasm and energy was palpable every time we got together. It really drove home why people love making movies so much. Everyone gave everything they had, and it shows in the finished product. I am proud, and they should be too, of what we produced.