Storytime with Wade

     When it came to developing the story for "In His Eyes" it was very much impromptu.  I essentially grabbed my sketchbook and clicked play on one of my Spotify playlists and tried to think visuals. I feel I often think the visuals or colors before I think of story in the past, so why not try again. Over the course of about an hour I jotted down ideas and individual storyboard frame, but I hear my suitemate talking to his girlfriend on facetime. 

    I do want to start by mentioning that our college dorm room was built in the 60s and its small, though we do share a common area which has its pros and cons. On one hand its very easy to make friends with suitemates you probably wouldn't in most other dorms at FSU, but it's also a small area where you can't really hide anything you say. In the case of this suitemate, he also does not care at all about what he knows we hear. All I'm going to say is that I have a very in-depth understanding about his life and relationship. Anyways, this night he was playing Call of Duty: Mobile with his girlfriend (since it's one of his favorite games to play), but in a special to him she kept killing him in 1v1's. At a point of frustration he yelled that he'd kill her next time. I thought about the phrase and also happen to watch Gone Girl a couple days prior to this brainstorming session and started to write a monologue.

 "I'm going to die. Murdered potentially. There's a look in his eyes. That's not my Jack..."

    I was getting somewhere; I have the start of a story and the framework for what would become the open lines of the film. I didn't want to rip off Gone Girl and portray yet another abusive relationship where the guy's an asshole for whatever reason to a hopeless girl; that's expected. During this time I was preparing for a presentation where I would discussing the social topic of Gender through the film Turning Red for my Multicultural Film class (check out this article, its a pretty cool read), and one of the points that came up was traits associated with both the masculinity and femininity as well as hegemonic masculinity. I found the common trait that men struggle to be emotional expressive to be interesting and began to wonder how that might come to play in a gay relationship. What if neither one of them could read the other's emotions? 

Author of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto

    This also represented me the ability to represent more kinds of people on screen. GLAAD.org reported that in 2021 only about 20% of films released in the US by major studios had any queer characters (16 out o 77 films). Minor spoiler I guess, but "In His Eyes" would also end up being the only film out of the 21 that would screening during Aquila Entertainment's Full Circle Film Festival that had queer characters, so I'm glad I was able to present this story in this way. Moving away from statistics, it also was to the story's benefit include two men in a relationship. Like I said before if it were a woman's narration about her experience with a man it'd be familiar, so that was a no; if it were the other way around following a man's narration about his experience with a women, I'd be worry about audiences taking a S.C.U.M. Manifesto route of understanding. By including the two men, I felt there would be more room for audience to dissect the story and see which character they would resonate with more without defaulting to certain sides which I fear would happen if it were a heterosexual relationship. Also a  simple reason for sticking with this setup would be: gay people have shitty relationships too. 

    Around Mid-February I finished writing the monologue Asher's character would narrate, just in time for the casting call post. You see about a week prior I had lunch with my Producer, Sam Perez Laurenza, to discuss the schedule for the film. Since we were tied to two other productions ("Unfinished" where Sam and I would swap positions and "Sold Out" for Aquila Entertainment which I would DP and Sam would PD for) we wanted to set up what the next month or so was going to look like. Sam called the weekend of March 23 and 24 since it would shoot in their dorm so logistics are made much easier, and I called the following weekend which would be include on the casting call info. A wrench got thrown into the works when "Sold Out" which was aiming for March 2nd and 3rd, was pushed back to the weekend of March 23 and 24. Since we were locked to "Sold Out" prior to Sam finishing their script we prioritize the weekend for that film and pushed back "Unfinished". Point is we'd be working on films on back-to-back weekends. 

    Since the shoot date was being locked in with the casting call I would've needed a finished draft for the cast call for peoples' self tapes. I included an excerpt of Asher's monologue for his audition and wrote a dialogue scene which wouldn't make it to the screen for Lev, since his character wouldn't have any synchronous dialogue; this dialogue scene would also be used for chemistry readings during the call backs. For the sake of keeping up, by the time the self tapes were due I finished writing the prose for each scene and putting the monologue in a script format that would make it helpful for my cinematography to start thinking. 

    In terms of script, it was basically finished with some minor phrasing / spelling changes made in a second draft, but for all intensive purposes it was now time for the main brunt of pre-production.