My First Short Film

Brandon Allan as Marcelus Qwade in a scene from “The Origins of The Harlem Shake” 2013.

So here I am living in a third-floor apartment in East Providence, with little to no experience of writing sketches. For days now I’ve been thinking about some kind of short video that I could present to Chris so we could film. Then BOOM it hit me, I can’t remember how but I thought of shooting a movie trailer, for a film that would never get made. A sketch. The idea was based around “The Harlem Shake” and how it was invented. Again, no idea how that came to mind. It was originally written to be 45 seconds to a minute long. I brought the idea to Chris and he was in. Day One: we set my room up for a scene where my character was watching TV and was getting inspired by dancers in a commercial. We had lights set up, a green screen on the TV, the cameras were ready, and we were ready to go! About ten minutes into the shoot, we came up with so many more ideas then originally planned we just stopped and said: “why don’t we just make this into a film”? So that is exactly what we did. I started writing a script and we started planning our first film. The script was written on Microsoft Word and it looked like a school essay. I had a lot to learn, but at the time I felt I wrote the funniest most well put together script since Malibu’s Most Wanted. During the writing process, I knew it would be hard getting locations, so I wrote according to places I knew would let us film. I had a scene in a restaurant, and since I worked at one I asked my boss and he said yes. I wrote a scene that took place in a cellphone store and luckily my good friend Mike was managing one and of course, he said yes. And this went on for a number of scenes, like a gym, a comedy club, and a warehouse (which at the time Chris and a few of his friends started renting a studio in a warehouse for a production company they were starting, how perfect right?). I knew a few people that really wanted to help out and act in it so we took all the help we could get. I asked local actors, friends, family, and anyone that showed interest just from overhearing us talk about it, to help us out. This took a lot of work from a lot of people since we really had no idea what we were doing. We improvised a lot of the dialogue, camera angles, and had to adapt on the fly to things we didn’t plan for. We sure learned a lot. We shot all of the scenes within a few months and decided to go take a trip to New York to get some shots of the city. Since this movie was based on “The Harlem Shake” we had to go to Harlem. We got shots of my character walking passed the famous Apollo Theater, shots of Times Square, and other b-roll shots of New York. We were super happy with this project and couldn't wait to show it. For the premiere, we rented out The Comedy Connection, the largest and most famous comedy club in Rhode Island and probably one of the most popular ones in all of New England. The turn out was amazing and we even made some money. We printed DVD’s and sold them after the film. Every reaction we saw, we knew we were onto something. I felt it during the shooting but seeing the reactions from all the hard work we put in, it really solidified those gut feelings. Well, that’s it for now, and I hope you all are staying safe during these trying times. Enjoy the movie below, and see ya next week for more! Also submit your email below the movie to subscribe to my newsletter, and stay up to date!