I.T. NEVER ENDS
Once we had made “The Review”, we knew we had to continue on to our next short. One of the things that we had learned while were working on the next one was that you should “write what you know”. Given that the four of us were all techies, we decided to do a movie about a day in the life of one.
We all threw in funny stories we had. From people complaining about printers to co-workers thinking they could do our job to people who would thought they could stop you anywhere and get you to work on their issue. Once we had a good stack of stories, Edwin took the reigns and put it all together into a single storyline.
Before we shot this one, we added Richard Friend to the company. He had done the graphics design for “The Review” and was very into being involved in the company.
For this film, we tried to be a bit more professional. We actually had a casting call for it. Of course it was still only our friends who showed up for it, but we still had a good turnout of 10-12 people. (All of whom got a part in the movie). I also purchased a Canon XL1s prosumer Mini0DV camera. At the time, it was one of the top prosumer cameras available and it served us well for 10 shorts.
As luck would have it, I was still working for the same company and they did another company move, yet still had the old building leased out for a couple of months. So we had full access to the entire floor of an office space to shoot at. For this one we took an entire weekend. We used just about every inch of that office space.
Initially, when we started shooting the film, Eric was actually just going to be the DP. But he helped out so much with the direction of the film that we decided it worked better for both of us to have co-director credits.
When we finished shooting the film after that weekend, I quickly put together a rough cut. A couple of watches into the film we decided we needed to add a couple more scenes that showed what he did throughout the day. So I called in a favor with Demetrius Parker, an actor friend of mine who had been in the local indie film industry for over 10 years at that point. He was able to hook us up with a couple of actors to shoot some cutaway scenes. We took another weekend at the office space and knocked them out.
Once it was all finished we entered also entered it into a couple of film festivals. While we didn’t get into any, we did get a call from Slamdance. They saw potential in the story and thought it might be good to turn it into a TV show. We quickly put together a package and sent it over for them to shop around. Unfortunately, it wasn’t picked up by anybody, but given that “The IT Crowd”, “The Office” and even the more recent “Silicon Valley”, we were definitely onto something.
Camera – Canon XL1s
Credits: Producer, Co-Director, Editor
Without further ado, here is “I.T. Never Ends”