"Time Withers" Senior Project to Film Production

This past week has been an adventure! I had the opportunity to be in a short film. I have been in film before, but not cast as one of the main actresses. This film is a little different than most short films, because it tells the story through dance. There is a little voice over work or you could say narration at the beginning, but it truly tells the story all through dance.

Instead of posting what happened all in one post, I will post one a day until I finish telling what happened and how it all went down. If I tried to post everything it would be the longest post in the world!

So here it goes...

Part 1 - Elisha's Senior Project

I was approached in August 2010 by Elisha Thompson to dance in her senior project at BYU. I didnt always have time to be in senior projects at BYU because I was always so busy. But her senior project really interested me. She told me what it was about and I was on board immediately! It was about her grandparents love story. They wrote while he was at war, got married and had kids after the war, and latter the wife develops Alzheimer's and dies. Me and Elisha contacted a long time dance friend John Graham to be a part of it. He was no longer a BYU student at the time and we had to get special permission for him to dance in it.

After long rehearsals, practicing my facial and body expressions, the final piece was shown at Senior Projects in October 2010. Everyone loved it. No joke, lots of people cried when they saw it, even my dad! This was one of my favorite pieces I have ever performed. In my opinion, I believe it is one of the best senior project to step foot on stage at BYU. Congrats to Elisha!

Cast and Elisha, the Choreographer, at Senior Projects Showing in October 2010

Me and Elisha! She was so nice to give me flowers the last night of the performance.

Me and John Graham. He is dressed in military uniform and Im just a cute 1940's house wife.

Part 2 - Interest to make it into a short film

My good friend, Garrett Gibbons, heard about the piece and before even seeing it wanted to make a short film. He lives in Washington State, so I had to put a filmed copy up on You Tube for him to see. I posted it a little over a month ago and right away he started making plans to make it.

Garrett has been doing this kind of stuff for some time now and I knew that It was going to be great. To make this look professional enough to enter into film festivals, we needed a small budget to help Garrett travel down to Utah, rent costumes and pay a make-up and hair artist. Garrett, Elisha and dancers all agreed to donate their time to make this happen. Therefore our budget only needed to be about $1,500 to cover all the costs. In reality, this is nothing! But, Garrett figured that it would work.

On July 12th, Garrett started to raise the money through Kickstarter.com. It is a website for artists of all kind to raise money for projects. We only had 7 days to raise the money, because we had to start filming on the 20th of July. Yes, this did happen a lot faster than planned and its because all of us found that this would be the only window of opportunity to get together. It just kinda happened. All of us are so busy!

Note: If you are interested in looking at the project, go to kicstarter.com and type in Time Withers in the search box.

We were all so nervous that it wouldn't get funded in time. 7 days is not very much time to raise $1,500. On kickstarter.com, if a project does not get funded in time then the project does not happen. After 3 days of trying to raise money, we were sure that it would not happen... at least i did. Surprisingly after 4 days, it happened! We were funded! Mostly because of Mike and Lisa Derington. I had only posted the information on my facebook page. I didnt even talk to them on the phone about it. But, they fell in love with what we were trying to do and donated the rest needed to be funded. They are the Executive Producers! So, I owe them a big thank you!

The project was funded by Friday July 15th. On Saturday we all started furiously getting things ready to film. I found a couch, we all researched costumes and Garrett confirmed a hair and make-up artist. We were all in shock it would happen!

To be continued........

Come back in a day or two to get part 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the story! I will be giving fun details about the process and what happened. You will not want to miss it!

Thanks for reading!