Short Films in Focus: Ava’s Dating a Senior! | Features

This might be a loaded question, but can you walk me through the process of creating a scene with these people, and then the editing process? 

The essentials are straightforward: I have an idea for a scene. I talk about it with the kids. During lunch we do the scene, in one continuous take, for about 30 minutes. There is an iPhone on each kid in the scene (if it’s three kids, then three iPhones) and I have a Lav mic on each kid, going into a TASCAM DR-70. I let them improvise and keep bringing them back to the central thesis of the scene and feeding them lines in the moment, when their tangents get too off-topic. Then we airdrop all the footage from the different phones to my computer. I sync and stack the footage in Final Cut and then I edit a rough piece together by the end of the day, to be sure of what we need to shoot the next day. It’s run and gun; but it allows the movies to stay loose and the plots to develop organically. But in the end, it’s hours of footage, which translates into months of editing. 

What went into the idea for the short?

I try to let the stories kinda come to me. I’ve had some of these students for six years, and so I’m privy to some gossip from time to time. Then, based on a nugget of truth, I will try to create a very light fictional narrative around it. For example, in “Ava’s Dating a Senior!”, Ava was in fact dating a senior—and there was a lot of drama surrounding that. It reminded me of a lot of memories from my own freshman year in high school, and so I focused the movie on Silas—who is in love with a girl in his grade, but is jealous because she is dating someone that, essentially, he believes he can’t compete with.  

What has the response been like to both/either “Teenage Emotions” and/or “Ava’s Dating A Senior!”? 

I am overwhelmed by the response to both. Both “Ava’s Dating a Senior!” And “Teenage Emotions” premiered at Slamdance and got great reviews. We just put “Ava’s Dating a Senior!” online two weeks ago and were blessed with the Vimeo Staff Pick badge, which has allowed a lot of people to find it and watch it. 

In both films, you seemed to have avoided the trappings of using phones and texting as part of the narrative and keeping the interactions almost entirely personal. It makes the film seem timeless, in a way. Was that important to you? 

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