“So it will be like Groundhog Day but the previous iterations don’t go away and the character will have to work with their previous and future selves to solve puzzles”.
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Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Lucas Kavanagh ; I write and talk about science, often with my good friend and creative partner Jesse Lupini . Our latest project is Iteration 1 , a short Sci-Fi film and one of the winners of Crazy 8s 2016 . Over the next month you will be able to follow the process of this script transforming into a film here as well as on our facebook and twitter pages.
Jesse and I were on a late night walk though Mount Pleasant, we often walk and talk for hours, pitching ideas for podcasts, movies, and apps to one another. This idea was a good one, a short puzzle film with a 60 second loop, adding another version of the main character each time. This character would need to be clever and help their future self to escape. More than that, they would learn and develop as they are forced to watch their past mistakes unfold over and over in front of them. I found it to be a very intriguing concept; this is how Iteration 1 was born.
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Jesse not only had a great idea, he had a way to make it happen. This was the first time I had heard of Crazy 8s, every year six teams are given a small amount of money as well as the tools and support to bring their films from initial concept to final product. It sounded like a long shot and competition was fierce; still, Jesse and I have a policy of applying for anything and everything we think we stand a slim chance at.
However, I was imminently departing for Sri Lanka to spend two months onboard a scientific research vessel, documenting an attempt to start drilling hole through the Earth’s crust to the mantle. The night before I left Vancouver we sat down in front of a camera and recorded our video pitch. There’s a hard 5:00 minute limit on these and at first we went way over, close to 9:00. So we simply recorded it again, and again, eight times in total until we finally got it down to 4:58.
We were overjoyed to hear we made it to the next round, the in-person pitches. When our time came, Jesse entered the room, placed a laptop on the table to Skype me in from a sketchy hotel room in Colombo. It was 2:30 am on my end me so I was a little tired and could barely hear what was happening but that pitch secured us a place in the top twelve. At this point, the possibility of us actually winning this thing first dawned on me.
Then came the hard part, we needed to write a script with only the satellite internet available in the middle of the Indian Ocean to communicate. We bounced the script back and fourth, going through nine official drafts and countless minor revisions but we soon realized a polished script might not be enough to win. So Jesse brought on our producers Mert and Arshia who immediately accelerated the project into true pre-production.
We hadn’t even won yet but the scale of the project already astounded me. Tasks, goals, and deadlines were meticulously planned out from the end of December till the premiere on February 27. When we found out we were one of the six winners, we took only a brief moment to congratulate each other and immediately returned to the work of securing a crew with the talent and passion needed to make this tremendously ambitious project happen.
Watching this process remotely has been frustrating at times, I’ve often felt useless and very far away but I’m also tremendously excited. It is hard to believe that in just a few days I will fly back to Vancouver and land in the middle of an incredible team of people working to make a script that I co-wrote happen. Stay tuned because this is going to be crazy!
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