The practical footage we shot for this subplot is some of my favorite footage. This also made it a painful reality for me when I had to chop it out of my final project. The reason for cutting it is twofold. Firstly, it doesn't cut together very well, as you can see above. This type of scene required more shots that I simply didn't have. I'd storyboarded this scene until I was certain it would work, and it still fell short. Looking at the footage now, after all these years, it's clear to me how I'd approach the shot list but even then I'm sure I'd fail to gather everything I'd need (because you never have enough footage).

The second reason, the reason I'm writing this article, has to do with symbolism and how I've learned not to do it. More importantly, this is somewhat a diary entry I'm airing publicly, because I'm exploring how I'd tackle this again if I had the chance.

My failure became apparent during my NYU thesis review. For the uninitiated, this is where your thesis film is screened by select faculty members and they determine if you've learned enough to be worthy of receiving the coveted Master's Degree. Going into my review I felt uneasy with the product I'd made (for good reason). Some of my previous work had received high praise around the school, and it felt like folks expected a lot from me. I wasn't handing them a product I felt good about.

And the feedback was more hurtful than I anticipated. One of the faculty members stated, "I'm worried. I don't think you have the footage you need to make this into a coherent story." 

Ouch. 

My biggest problem? I believe it was the dream sequence whereby the protagonist is chased down by an airplane. When I'd written it, it made complete sense. Dawn is haunted by her passion to escape her current life. This desire is manifested through her visions of an airplane that haunts nearly every scene: in the background, on the fringes or through audio cues.

And how, exactly, did I tie this symbolic figure to Dawn's desires for freedom? In the opening scene she's sitting with an aviation book in her lap. What a terrible idea. What was I thinking? Past-Shawn is very dumb. Future-Shawn is a little less dumb, so let's see what he has to say about the scene where the airplane attacks.

In the lead-up to this scene, Dawn discovers her dad has been cheating on her mom with her aunt. This movie is actually about Dawn struggling with this information and finding the courage to tell her dad she knows about his adulterous affair. In a subsequent scene, Dawn and her father are shoveling cow manure until her aunt arrives and daddy goes a running. As Dawn watches the aunt's mini van drive down the lane with her father inside, Dawn is chased by the airplane.

This confused EVERYBODY! And it should. It makes no sense.

It makes no sense because I failed to do two things: (1) tie the airplane to the symbol it represented, and (2) distinctly separate her reality from her fantasy.

In one of our directing classes, my professor screened a short film made by a prior student. If memory serves me right, it was called Stick Boy, but I can't find any evidence of its existence on the internet. It was, to me, a perfect MOS film (a movie filmed without sound or dialogue). The film opens on a young boy poking a condom on the ground with a stick. He then stumbles on a young girl playing hide and go seek. He begins to poke her with the stick. She resists. He persists. She struggles. He kills her. It's very striking. 

The stick in Stick Boy is symbolic of, well, his penis. How do we know? Because there has been a direct correlation made between the stick and the condom from the very first shot. When Stick Boy pokes the girl, we have carried our prior knowledge of that shot into this scene. The stick has been sexualized and we understand clearly what we are seeing—a rape.

At no point in Bull Thistle did I connect an airplane to anything outside of itself. The airplane was always an airplane and nothing else.

I might have gotten away with this if I'd addressed issue number two and better separated Dawn's reality from fantasy. Honestly, it might have been as easy as changing the color balance so we could see something was different. We'll never know. But from a screenplay perspective, this was flawed from the get-go. 

When her aunt's car drives away and immediately the airplane chases her down, the absurdity alone is not enough for an audience to understand what's going on. At the end of the day, I'd failed to be an audience member of my own movie. I did not visualize my film from the only perspective that matters. 

I'm lucky to have had enough footage to prove the professor at my thesis review wrong; I did have enough there to tell a story sans-airplane. But it was a painful process of recutting the film a thousand different ways in an attempt to salvage this footage. In the end I had to let it go.