"Split" – a short

Hey folks!

I was introduced to Craig Wood, the producer of this project through an awesome production designer, Russell Barnes. Once Craig and I met we realized we weren’t actually the strangers we thought we were. Turns out I had designed a logo for his musical “Camp Rolling Hills”, Small World!

The project was the first ten pages of a feature script and to be used as a fundraising teaser. The scene was set in a bowling ally which is a fun location to work with. The trick was, I had to turn the shoe counter in a Queens, NY bowling alley into a bar in Kentucky bowling ally! All of this within a super micro MICRObudget of $200. I was excited for the challenge and set to work. This is what I came up with. Look below for the clip, “before” pics and some of the graphics I created to set the mood.

SPLIT the short from Craig Wood on Vimeo.

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Everyone loves BEFORE/AFTER pictures. Take a look below to see what the ally looked like BEFORE we dressed it.

Following the wisdom of my art direction teacher at NYU, John Nyomarkay, I like to choose an image to center my design around. Sometimes it’s a photograph, a work of art or the set from an existing play or film. This time, it was the establishment’s outlandish and decaying carpet! As soon as we walked into the bowling for the scout I instantly fell in love with the wacky flooring and thought it perfectly fit the tone of film.

Here is the Logo I designed for the bowling team shirts, “Santa’s Pinions”

Since this film was going to be screened as a fundraising piece, we were not concerned with clearances for branding and I wanted to make something funky and silly.

I envisioned this film taking place visually somewhere in the 90′s. It need not chronologically take place there, but the characters were still living like it was the 90′s, their own personal hay-days battling the decay of time so their setting appropriately reflected that.

Additionally, it made sense to me that the bowling ally, like many bowling allies, would be antiquated and still sentimentally hanging onto everything, even the freebies like table advertisements, standardized menu boards and aging photographs (which can be seen poking behind the bar).