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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWhy did you choose URI?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I knew very little about the program at the time, which, to be fair, was a lot smaller than it is now. I knew I wanted to go to school reasonably far away from home (I lived in Vermont), and it was a sunny day when I went on the tour, so the vibes were good!<\/p>\n\n\n\n What brought you back together after ten years, and why was this the right moment to collaborate on a film?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At URI, a small group of us started what we named \u201cwriter\u2019s club\u201d. No rules or guidelines, just get together and write anything you want. On and off, a few of us kept the tradition going after graduating. Often my projects would peter out as I\u2019d change ideas and get inspired to do something different. I don\u2019t know what happened differently this time, but I just got inspired and kept going until I\u2019d finished my first feature screenplay. I think, coming out of the COVID pandemic, it felt like the first big collaborative creative project I\u2019d done since playing music in a band, and there was something very cathartic about getting everyone back together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where did the idea for the film come from, and how did it develop once you started working together?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two of the other actors in the film were in a band after college that disbanded during the COVID shutdown and never got going again. In that time, we all moved to different states. In a lot of ways, the timing of the pandemic really accelerated the end of our 20s, and once we were out the other side, I can say at least for myself I had gotten married, bought a house, and had a kid, so it felt like a lot of big life stages in a short time. Ironically, all of us coming back together again to reconnect sort of mirrored the movie’s plot, where a band reconnects after a long time apart. Luckily, our reunion didn’t end with serial murders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest thing for me that came out of collaboration with this project was the huge amount of improv we did. After nailing down the lines, we often threw the script to the side and did the scene knowing where it would go, but throwing in new jokes. I was the worst at breaking character, especially whenever working with Kyle, who is a comic genius in terms of timing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What surprised you most about working together after so many years apart?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It felt like no time had passed. Some of the people working on the film I\u2019d stayed very close to, and others I reached out to after not talking to them since graduating ten years before. On set, when we finally all got together again, everyone seemed to have the same sense of humor and similar sensibilities to what I can remember back in 2014\/2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Were there any professors, classes, or experiences at URI that influenced this project?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Keith Brown ran a 445 Production class where you had to complete a short film in a semester. During that class, for the first time, I really felt like a filmmaker. It was very inspiring to see what everyone was creating, and it didn\u2019t feel like traditional schoolwork. It felt like we were living our dream jobs, and there was some sort of importance to what we were doing. Looking back, the projects I made were very rudimentary, but the storytelling skills I was picking up are still things I think about today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s your favorite URI memory?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n My year was the first year students were allowed to attend the SXSW Film Festival. It was a total adrenaline rush seeing movies from morning till night all week, everything from big-budget Wes Anderson films to low-budget werewolf movies. Adam Wingard spoke after premiering The Guest at a midnight screening. He came from the mumble-core film movement, which, at the time, was really inspiring a lot of us and a huge inspiration when I started writing Don\u2019t Make Friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What advice would you give current URI students hoping to pursue a similar creative path?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Film school is really a chance to find your people above all else. At the time, much more than making short films to pass a class, I was being inspired by the creativity of all the people around me, showing me movies I\u2019d never seen, feeling competitive to make my movies look as good as others’, or learning about gear or techniques people were using in their shorts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But after all that was done, and we all had day jobs years later, I was still able to call in a bunch of favors from a dozen folks who were helping me out because this was what they wanted to be doing rather than a chore. Yes, it was really hard completing your days working really long hours out in the heat, etc., but what was awesome was it also just felt like hanging out with my friends, and I was still being inspired by the people who were helping me find inspiration way back then, hearing their ideas, what they were watching, and just talking film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Film\/Media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3771,"featured_media":15917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23,96,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-profile","category-film-media","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3771"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15916"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15928,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916\/revisions\/15928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/harrington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}