“ABSCONDED”

Boy, was this a big project. My partner, Vinh, & I originally came up with the rough idea for this film at the end of our junior year. Except it was really just in its infancy. We new we wanted to have some sort of storyline based around a robber and have some massive growth of his character to the a point where he saves everyone, but not himself. And now a year later, we pretty much kept that storyline, but reworked it. As I mentioned above, I had a really tough concussion this year. And while I was dealing with that and making “Sugar” we also had to go through pre-production for “Abconded.” I have to say, I could not have done that without Vinh. He grinded so hard to help us out especially since I couldn’t look at a screen for a while. I’ll never be able to thank him enough. This film is a result of over 7 months of film work from start to finish. A lot of late nights shooting and a lot of great lessons learned.

This film’s rough cut started off at 14 minutes long. We nailed the first two acts, but because we weren’t able to get the location for our ORIGINAL ending scene, we completely switched up the ending. Consequently, as the one and only Mr. Taylor pointed out after watching our rough cut, the third and final act now didn’t align with the rest of the story. Vinh and I then went into about an 8 hour long depression until we were in the editing room later that night trying to make what we thought was going to be a much lamer 4 minute version of our film. Mr. Taylor then realized, ultimately saving our film, that we could still make the ending work by messing around with the order of the clips. So, in the end, we somehow made it work. It’s not how we would want it work in a perfect world, but because we didn’t have the shots that we needed we worked around that problem. And hey, I think the ending still tells the story it needs to tell, which is most important. Story before everything.