JEFF Premiere's at Palm Springs International ShortFest 2022 !
/Happy to share that I’ll be heading to Palm Springs International Short Fest for the world premiere of JEFF, a short film I produced and collaborated on story with director/writer Walter Woodman of the creative collective shy kids.
JEFF is the story of an Amazon delivery drone with one last mission at the end of the world.
Not only will this be JEFF’s first time on the big screen, but also the first time that shy kids (the creative collective behind JEFF) and Yo Productions (Executive Producer’s of JEFF) will gather in person. We’re looking forward to finally meeting Trey, Drake, and the YO team whom we’ve spent countless hours with online.
What brought shy kids and the YO team together? Well, Walter Woodman asked his friend Max if he knew anyone who wanted to make a movie during what felt like the real life apocalypse - COVID-19.
“He was like yo.”
“I was like yo?”
“He was like YO productions.”
So Walter met Trey from YO on zoom and pitched him our latest idea. At that point JEFF was an entirely different concept, a short entitled “moon kids” - sort of like Stand By Me…but in space.
Cool, right? Trey thought so, and offered us a modest budget to go out and shoot.
The film was about two siblings hunting down delivery drones in the apocalypse. They were looking for food and salvation in a broken world.
In a matter of weeks, our cast, crew and locations were locked. We were ready for liftoff …not so fast.
On our first day, after just a first few hours of shooting, we came to the unfortunate realization that our five year old lead actress - Keira Burke who had delivered a flawless audition just days before, now had a totally different movie in mind. Not much you can do when a five year old makes up her mind. We bribed her with barbies, candies, and sand cakes, piggy back rides and games of Where’s Walter. Alas, nothing would sway Keira to return to our script.
At the end of our shoot we were left with a whole lot of beautiful footage but not a ton of story.
Our editor and co-writer Jason Kirchner did everything he could to salvage the script. We had a 15 minute version. A 12 minute version. There were moments of brilliance no doubt, but it seriously lacked something. We were so desperate to salvage Moon Kids we even created a version that had Terrence Malik esque poem written by poet Elizabeth Mundenyo voiced over-top.
None of it worked.
The only shots that Walter connected with were those of the drone peppered throughout.
“I liked the drone. It felt like a god-like presence, watching us. Judging us. One day, while replaying the footage without sound, I looked over to my producer/partner Sidney Leeder and said “hey, the drone is like Jaws from the sharks perspective - let’s just make the whole film about the drone”.”
So in 20 minutes he drafted up a brand new script, one from the drones perspective.
10 minutes later Walter recorded himself doing the voice over - his best Steven Wright impression.
And in that half hour, Moon Kids morphed into the short we now call JEFF.
We re-edited the film using purely drone footage from the day, plus some pick-up shots, some moments sourced from other drone operators and a few licensed clips of Chernobyl.
The amalgamation birthed a story about a worker drone, tired of his routine, resentful of his masters. He longed for vacation, and prayed for a break from his mundane reality.
JEFF is a story about overconsumption and the massive mega corporations pouring fuel on the fire of our demise. Witnessing the world from JEFF’s POV allows the audience to view humanity from a new angle - which is what we need to do if we intend to get out of this alive…
Walter Woodman and I are currently in development on the feature length version of JEFF. You can catch JEFF (the short) at Palm Springs ShortFest on June 22nd 2022 at the Palm Springs Cultural Center screening in the Stranger than Fiction category - Reserve your ticket.