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Crossroads
A bartender in a financial pinch stumbles upon an unethical but sure-fire way to resolve his issues.
15 DEC 2021
Synopsis:
Dylan Barkley is working when he finally decides to open a letter he's clearly been putting off reading, It's his wife's medical bills. He doesn't make nearly enough to cover the bill working as a bartender. After taking the first order of his shift, he goes to put the cash in the till where he stumbles upon another envelope, a deposit. Dylan doesn't know what the deposit is for, all he knows is that there's enough money in it to cover the medical bill. He steals the envelope, slips away from the bar and sends the money off to clear the debt. as he returns to the bar he sees that his manager is outside and knows what he's done. Dylan can do nothing but face the consequences of his actions but at least he knows his wife's debt has been settled.
Production:
Originally titled 'The Barman', we made this film as part of a university assignment, our brief was extremely restrictive as one of the main aspects of this unit was to emphasise the creativity that restrictions inspire. The most notable restrictions were that we were only able to include two characters and could not have any dialogue.
Pre-production went really smoothly to be honest, besides for a couple of rewrites of the script everything was quite straightforward. My main contributions during this stage of production were creating the prop letter and call sheets. We hadn't really established roles for the production other than our 'on-set roles' so rather than everyone getting on with role-specific tasks, we all worked on individual tasks, hence why I did a mixture of producing and production design.
Securing our shooting location was relatively easy as Dan had a connection with the owners of a local pub, so we were able to shoot there. The main issue we faced with this location (and the only real issue we faced throughout the production) was that we could only shoot there for 2 days, between 08:00 - 14:00, leaving us with 12 hours to shoot our entire film... which was a daunting task. We spent a while carefully working out the most efficient shooting schedule and movement order so we could have a successful shoot.
Thanks to a combination of a great team and meticulous planning our set ran like clockwork. Despite only having 6 hours each day to set up, film and de-rig, we finished both days with over an hour to spare (on top of the safety hour we had already left free in the shooting schedule ). As a group of five people who had never worked together, some of whom had never worked on a film project before we were all pleased with final film.
Reflection:
I really enjoyed working on Crossroads, my only criticism of the project is that narratively... IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE! Why is Dylan opening personal letters at work? Who leaves £5000 sitting in a till? and why does the medical bill come to so much, especially considering the film is set in the UK where most health care is free? The film has a laughable amount of plot holes and contrivances. Its narrative issues aside, It's visually sound and well-edited. Crossroads is a film I'm proud to have worked on.