Barely Alive
Turning short films scripts into radio plays! First Read Radio is a beefed up table read professionally recorded with voice actors and sound designed by a team of top-notch audiophiles all while under the direction of an experienced storytelling team.
After the world seems to have ended due to an airborne virus, a resilient brother does everything he can to keep his 12-year-old sister safe.
Credits
Written by: Bryce Lane, Garrett Sheeks, and Gary Jones
Directed by: Gary Jones
Sound Supervisor and Editor: Ryan Gottshall
Produced by: Awfully Good Media
Recorded at Spacewalk Sound
spacewalksound.com
Cast
Narrator: Kerry Nash
Will: William Gabriel Grier
Ana: Marley Fang
Tom: Charles Brettner
Laura: Analysia Gramajo
Have a script you’d like to hear on the show? Head over to www.filmshortage.com/firstreadradio to submit today. We’re accepting scripts 15 pages or less for season 2 now.
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West Winds
The survivor of an unknown apocalypse struggles to navigate the physical and mental hardships of isolation. When all hope is lost, a stray dog enters their life and reminds them of what it means to be alive.
Infiziert
It is cold an wet. Vincent is on his own now. He is seeking revenge on those how turned his life around, but he has to decide how far he is willing to go.
Director's Statement
When reading the book Eating Animals, published in 2009, by Jonathan Safran Foer I stumbled upon the statement that there is scientific consensus that new viruses, which move between animals and humans, will be a major global threat into the foreseeable future. According to the WHO the “World is ill-prepared for ‘inevitable’ flu pandemic“.
That statement stayed in my head for quite a while. After reading even more on this topic I began writing different drafts for a short film. But one draft after another the virus theme shifted more and more towards the backstory of the film. I realized that I need to make it more about the characters and less about the virus. That was my biggest takeaway from this project, back then.
Before I did this short, the swine flue was all over the news and then the Ebola outbreak and MERS a couple years later, which where scary and tragic, but humanity managed quite well. So I had the feeling that we are not “ill-prepared” anymore. But little did I know, because then came COVID-19.
Anecdote
We were shooting the film in beginning of December, at first the apocalyptic scenes, three days, and then the flashbacks, two days. At the beginning the weather was more like autumn, and this is what it looks like in scene one. On the second day it was snowing all of a sudden, but that was okay for the scene we were shooting. It all melted away again pretty quickly, so on the third day we had autumn weather again and everything was going according to plan, so I thought. We were half way through until the first snow flakes started to fall and after 20 minutes it was all covered in white. We were freaking out. Because the scene was not finished and we wouldn't have enough time to re shoot half a day. We were banging our heads together and came up with the idea of splitting the scenes in two parts, separated with a flashback. I was so pissed at the weather that day, but in the end I am very glad it snowed, because it just adds so much more atmosphere in the final scene. Thank you weather God!
The Way Home
In a dying world what will matter most?
Director’s Statement
In a dying world what will matter most? It’s a question that forces you almost immediately to pause and determine for yourself, "what does matters most?". When the question was pressed upon me, I couldn’t help but think that my answer was as cliche as it could get; family. But I couldn’t deny that ‘family’ is and always will be the universal theme in these scenarios of a world-ending apocalyptic threat, so I wanted to personalise the concept in a way that felt raw, local and grounded to me. It was a big ask, especially with such a big concept, but it paid off when we were awarded 2x finalist awards for ‘Best Drama’ and ‘Best Sci-fi’.
The character we follow is a ruggard father figure who looks desperate to retrieve something or someone he treasures. Essentially, I wanted to explore the idea of a father’s unconditional love for his children and challenge the words we often speak haphazardly, ‘I would die for you’ and the father-daughter dynamic was a touching reality to me that fitted perfectly to this scenario.
Our goal in the end was to get people thinking about life and death - a concept we usually fear - and hopefully remind them of what really matters in the end; family. My desire is also that people would know that there is hope in the darkest of places even when the world around them is seemingly ‘coming to an end’.
Revival
Exploring a life without music.
Within 6 months of the outbreak humanity had been hunted to the brink of extinction and the world plunged into silence.
15 years later, Alex fights for her survival alone in the British wasteland.
After discovering an abandoned shelter Alex meets Jordan, a feral orphan whose passion for drumming forces her to confront her childhood trauma.
United over their love for music, they are forced to join together to fight against the monsters that lurk among them.
Director's Statement
As musicians ourselves we wanted to explore what life would be without music, and what it would feel like to rediscover music again for the first time! As big fans of the post-apocalyptic genre thanks to likes of The Last Of Us we thought it would be interesting to explore this concept in an apocalyptic landscape, seeing Alex find redemption through playing this beautiful guitar, a symbol of hope in the bleak world we had created. We set out wanting to tell this story and explore the challenges of producing an authentic apocalyptic world whilst on a tight self-funded budget, and we hope we have been able to touch audiences, striking a chord with musicians and film fans alike.
Flesh and Blood
When an apocalyptic virus threatens to turn her father into a violent monster, 18 year-old Max must lead him and her younger sister, Ellen, through a perilous mountain range in hope of finding a cure on the other side. With Max willing to risk it all to save her father, and Ellen willing to do anything to protect herself and Max, the small family finds itself not only struggling for survival against incredible odds, but also being torn apart from within.
Cast / Hannah Telle, Clint Jordan, Charlotte Alexis White
Written and directed by / Merlin Camozzi
Produced by / Tim Lewis, Linda Christina Riedmann, David Oh, Ben Haigh, Merlin Camozzi
Director of Photography / Julia Swain
Love at the End of Earth
The year is unknown, the world has been decimated by an unpredictable meteor strike leaving Austin and Eveline as the only survivors.
Director's Statement
Working with Paul as a writer for this 48 hour film was amazing, he gave us a story that had a lot of heart, and something where the entire cast and crew could fully dive into. Katie is an extremely talented actress, both Paul and Katie got nominations for Best Writing and Best Actress, respectively. We also were nominated for Best Costume Design, which was done by our amazing AD, Whitney. Austin is a multi talented filmmaker and did an amazing job as our editor, he only had limited time to edit this, yet did a stellar job! Overall everything you see was done in less than 48 hours, with a razor thin budget, yet we pulled it off which is pretty difficult to do. We were very happy and humbled to win the Audience Award, especially being that we had a very small team of 11 members, but our competition appreciated our film at it's debut so much that they voted for us! As a filmmaker to me, the story is most important, and having an ending that is rewarding, which is a big reason why I'm so proud of this film.
Dawn of the Deaf
When a strange sound wipes out the hearing population, a small group of Deaf people must band together to survive.
Dawn of The Deaf may sound like another addition to the typical zombie parody films, but we need to thank Robert Savage and his team for completely rewriting the genre in some of the most unexpected ways. We must warn you that the full cinematic experience is probably best when listening with headphones / or good speakers - which should be the case for any movie of course - but especially true for this one. The film reaches incredible sensory heights through its sound design, which was crafted particularly to fit the film's theme and to place the unaware audience at the same level as the deaf.
Our aim was to create a genre film that would connect Deaf and hearing audiences in an engaging, thrilling way. As opposed to re-treading the same narratives usually seen when dealing with disability, we wanted to create a tense story in which the characters' "disability" becomes their ultimate advantage over the hearing population.
More than just a Zombie film, the writers (Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd) did an immaculate job to steer us completely away from the genre with a set of small unrelated stories, and almost making us forget (half of) the title, three quarters into the film. All while the suspense is steadily growing up to the big turning point - which must say is preceded by one of the most enthralling and engaging scenes we've ever seen.
Sinner
In a dystopian future where the world has devolved into a pre-industrial state, the Purists rule supreme. The Purists blame technology for all the world’s past ills, and have deemed it to be inherently sinful.
A handful of Companions, human-like artificial intelligence, have managed to make it through the apocalypse. They survive the only way they can – by hiding in plain sight.
Sinner
In a dystopian future where the world has devolved into a pre-industrial state, the Purists rule supreme. The Purists blame technology for all the world's past ills, and have deemed it to be inherently sinful.
A handful of Companions, human-like artificial intelligence, have managed to make it through the apocalypse. They survive the only way they can - by hiding in plain sight.
I Dream of Zombies
A young man obsessed with the zombie apocalypse spends his time training, preparing and waiting. One day he wakes up to find that his dreams have come true...
Flesh and Blood
...like 28 Days Later meets a Bruce Springsteen song circa the Nebraska album...
When an apocalyptic virus threatens to turn her father into a violent monster, 18 year-old Max must lead him and her younger sister, Ellen, through a perilous mountain range in hope of finding a cure on the other side. With Max willing to risk it all to save her father, and Ellen willing to do anything to protect herself and Max, the small family finds itself not only struggling for survival against incredible odds, but also being torn apart from within.
FLESH AND BLOOD is a genre short that revolves around two key threats: the external threat of the virus (and the post-apocalyptic world that it has created) and the internal threat of a family tearing itself apart. We wanted to tell this story because we’re excited by character-driven genre films that are grounded in reality. Films like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, PRISONERS, and 28 DAYS LATER were all huge inspirations for the project due to way in which they were able to bring realistic characters and emotions into exciting, heightened storytelling environments. Similarly, though FLESH AND BLOOD is set in a world of “rage virus” infection, the film is grounded in the story of two sisters struggling to deal with an out-of-control parent, which lends the story an emotional truth not always found in genre films.
The World
When we sat down to create FLESH AND BLOOD, the goal was to create a different sort of zombie film. One of the first questions we asked ourselves was how to deal with the issue of the zombies themselves. From the jump, we knew that we would be dealing with a virus that affects the living, rather than reanimation of the dead, and that the infected would be fast, not slow. From there, we asked the question of what could make the virus more realistic.
The first thing we hit on the was the speed of the infection. Because this is a virus that affects both mind and body, it seemed unrealistic that it would take hold in a matter of seconds. Instead, it made sense that the virus would need time to fully take hold. Alzheimers was one example. It’s not like you get “infected” with Alzheimer's and then suddenly you’re gone. Rather, it starts slow and then gradually takes over.
Turning Point
Abandoned and exposed to a deadly disease, a young woman wakes up to discover she must survive the night alone.
Joe Penna and his team return with another exciting short sci-fi short that takes us to a possible post-apocalyptic near future, where a life-threatening airborne disease can turn you into some kind of zombie. It might sound a little typical, but the film portrays an interesting angle on the genre, and builds on the character confinement elements.
YouTube Space LA and SkyBound built a really really cool set and we had the opportunity to apply to a writer’s program at the space. It was awesome, it was about six classes... of us going in and talking to wonderful people like David Albert and [Academy Award winner] Geena Davis. So we wrote the script [and] got great notes from the program and had to figure out how to actually pull this off.
Written by Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison, they had the unusual but pleasurable task of writing a scene for a specific set. Ryan tells how it advantaged his preparations in pre-production:
One of the advantage of having the set already built is that I was able to create an identical set on the computer, I used a program called FrameForge to create a storyboard and we basically knew exactly what every single shot was going to look like even before we got to shooting
With is confined location, they were able to get creative with some extensive equipment which in turn allowed them to film the shots in sequence, a real rarity in productions. Despite the expensive looking production, the team kept everything at a minimum, including cast and crew - where even the director himself was turning on smoke effects from the floor during the scenes.
This is kind of a dream job for a director, we’re shooting everything in sequence so you get to see how things are turning out and I got to work mainly with just one actress on the set so it really gave me a chance to own my skills as a director.
Watch the excellent behind the scene doc which shows how the guys brought everything together, as well as all the unexpected difficulties that come through on set - just like the lead actress Jade being a bad car accident on her way to the shoot.
Read Jade's in-depth interview with our own collaborator Taylor Holmes.