My recent short film was a collaboration between me and my 8-year-old daughter. One morning, she came to me and said she wanted to make a movie. I couldn’t have been happier — and what we came up with was even better than I expected. The process was a blast from start to finish! If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out on below or on YouTube:
Behind the Scenes
When L.V. Butterscotch (her stage name) approached me with the idea of making a movie, I couldn’t have been more excited. While photography is my specialty, I’ve always had an interest in film and video production, and this felt like the perfect project to work on together.
I asked her to come up with a few themes we could use — and she delivered:
We sat down together and brainstormed how we could build a story around her ideas. We ultimately decided on three characters: a Doctor, a Scientist, and an Alien. From there, we talked through some scenarios, and I introduced her to the concept of a storyboard. She caught on quickly and set off to plan the film.
With our storyboard in hand, we headed on location (a.k.a. the basement) to start filming our short feature. Aside from a few minor technical hiccups, the shoot went great. We didn’t use a script — instead, we ad-libbed the scenes and tweaked them until we were happy with the results.
Editing took a few hours as we trimmed the footage down to the best takes and cleaned everything up. One of our goals was to make the credits longer than the film itself (a fun touch), so we turned to ChatGPT to help us craft a credit template. We even had it generate a few movie poster concepts. We cleaned up one of them, which you can see below:
With adding in credits for some of the music/sounds we used, and even dropping in a clip shot from my DJI Mini 3 Pro drone, our film was done. We had a lot of fun making it, and hope that all our viewers will appreciate our fun short.
