Rigged
This film was my senior directed study, which I worked on with my friend Mary Lashbrook after both of us finished our semester abroad in Los Angeles. This film was a labor of love for me in a couple ways:
1. It let me work with all the actors I'd worked with on projects before, or actors I'd never had the chance to cast. As a performance major, I'd acted alongside a number of people whose talents I had real respect for, and I wanted to highlight them in my final film at school. Plus, this being my last go-round before leaving school, I wanted to work with all of my friends one last time. Therefore: ensemble comedy.
2. A good friend of mine, Justin Ladd, played the lead, and I'd just finished crashing in his guest room for a month over Christmas break. To pay him back his kindness, I cast him as the romantic lead across from Yuni Hur, a girl he actually had a crush on at the time (we figured it would be kismet that in an ensemble comedy about trying to get a girl to fall for Justin's character, we actually tried to get the girl to fall for Justin).
Yuni actually ended up dating someone else, but the film did end up winning our school's Television Production of the Year Award.