Case study
About Shells.
"Shells" is a short film about our social behaviors, the complexity of emotion and, ultimately, the nature of being human.
Two couples get together after some time. In the process of catching up, making dinner and eating, exteriors crack as each member of the party touches in on their raw inner emotional states.
Cast & Crew
- Starring
- Leila Perry, Mia
- Will Nicol, Ethan
- Till Simon, Alex
- Nicole Souza, Jamie
- Director, Josh S. Rose
- Writer, Josh S. Rose
- Producer, Sean Levitan
- Assistant Producer, Rae Niwa
- 1st AD, Jessie Lee Thorne
- DP, Noah Toaso
- 1st AC, Natt Gonzalez
- 2nd AC, Eric Corona
- G&E, Jason (Salty) Rowlen
- Sound, Joseph Hartshorn
- Sound Editing, Grant Milliken & Josh S. Rose
- Colorist, Duncan Byrnes
- Movement, Madison Olandt
- Production Design, Katie Patrick
- HMU, Salvador Mejia
- Editor, Josh S. Rose
- Production Assistant, Juan Montoya
- Production Assistant, Ava Rothenberg
- Titles, Jon Ritt
- The song, "Shells," was performed and produced by I.O.U. Tequila
- Lyrics by Josh S. Rose
- Engineered by Grant Milliken
- Vocals, Frank Moschetto
- Guitar, Sergio Buss
- Keyboards, Grant Milliken
- Drums, Drew Cirincione
Getting deeper.
SHELLS was a unique project in that it sought to go as deep as it could go, but in a short format narrative format. For Director, Josh S. Rose, this was not completely unfamiliar territory, after a decade of work inside dance and performance, as both a photographer and filmmaker. But also, Rose's personal history with the interpersonal - the son of a psychologist, and an artist whose personal themes have touched in on emotionality and the human condition - allowed him to employ various devices and techniques to help push the story into deeper and deeper territories.
01. Movement
In dance, an artist accesses emotional territories in more somatic and immediate ways and Rose's co-creative style as a storyteller leans heavily on that training and those techniques working closely with artists.
In SHELLS, not only was there a lot of physicality to help actors convey emotion in more immediate, non-verbal terms (and a movement director on set to help establish a physical vocabulary), the movement was also intimately tied to the emotional territories that the actors inhabited.
02. Archetypes
Archetypes were another access point for our actors in this production. By giving them a character to inhabit - and one with a lot of literary and psychological history to pull from - it allowed them to switch quickly into a place to inhabit the emotional space they were being asked to access and make real to the viewer.
03. Maritime Theme
Throughout SHELLS, the audience is subtly introduced to sound and imagery that is directly inspired by the ocean. Sound design pulled from lighthouse foghorns, shrimp and underwater overlays. Visually, we are watching people cook and eat shrimp and one of they pieces of dialogue involves the scenario of waking up at sea.
04. Dialogue That Dives Downward
It's not spoken out loud, but the impetus for the script was to explore a post-Covid world, where people who had just experienced perhaps the most traumatic event of their lives are forcing themselves to re-emerge into a social situation as age old as a dinner party, while still holding what they're holding.
Covid was the same for everyone, and different for everyone. It was a worldwide event that everyone took part in, yet every person experienced the pain of it in individual and highly-personal ways. The script is meant to capture that complexity. And see how deep that might go.
The mechanism for the dialogue was to have the foursome start up high - lighthearted catch-up that is a bit stilted and steps over each other out of awkwardness and reacquainting. It then takes its first turn at the mention of a mutual friend. But this is still in a lighter realm.
The next conversation is the classic hedonism vs eudaimonia - a life of pleasure versus one that flourishes through effort and realized potential.
Next, the group goes much deeper as it takes on the idea of Heidegger's Thrownism , as exemplified in a mind exercise of imagining waking up on a boat at sea and not knowing how you got there.
Finally, as the group settles into their group dynamic and finds themselves in community, the final expression happens without any dialogue at all, but entirely through their physicality and interaction with each other.
05. Color, Composition, Culinary Arts and Clothing
One of the advantages of a short film in the indie film category is that the box is smaller. Instead of thinking laterally across numerous scenes, characters, sets and locations, you can go very deep on every element of the scene in which your story lives.
For SHELLS, we immersed ourselves in the ideas that could help the story do it's most powerful move, which was to bring audiences on this journey downward into our humanity's core. As discussed, the dialogue, the sound and the movement direction all were very key in this. But we also considered the look and feel of every shot and how story might be told through art, light and angle.
The characters all shed clothing throughout the film. A subtle, but important cue that the characters here were letting go of their own shells.
The peeling of shrimp is a core and direct metaphor for the same thing - pushing past our surface.
We changed color schemes for the various locations where our characters had their "breaks," with the final one isolating our subject in complete darkness.
06. The Song
Funny story, through the entire edit, we had a placeholder ending song: the on-the-nose Pulling Muscles From A Shell, by Squeeze. I guess we had some delusion of grandeur that we might even manage to talk them into letting us use it. It will come as no surprise that exactly zero calls or emails were returned.
Stuck without an ending track to bring the whole thing home, it was our composer, Grant, who suggested we just write and make one ourselves. I mean, it's L.A.
So, that's what we did. Pulled some ringers in, ate some pizza and just threw it all together. The team had been promised tequila for their services, which never actually came to fruition. Hence the band name: IOU Tequila.