How to Face a Blank Timeline When a $10,000 Grant Has To Be Paid Back in 30 Days

The plan was 25 pages. I finished 14. What two kids, no sleep, and a hard deadline taught me about cutting my own NonDē film.

There is nothing like sitting in a theater and hearing an audience react to a film you created.

The joke that lands just right and they laugh. The grief hits and you can year someone crying behind you. The thing you were trying to say, the thing you heard only in your own head when you were writing it, comes out of a stranger’s mouth in real time as they react to seeing it for the first time on screen. You spent months chasing a feeling, and suddenly there it is, alive in a dark room full of people you have never met.

THAT… is pure magic.

There isn’t anything else that comes close to it. That feeling is why you started. It is also the only thing that makes sense of the weeks you spend staring at a rough cut, wondering if you should just walk away.

This week the clock started on my film Before We Knew that we shot exactly a year ago. Last year I won a $10,000 grant to make my feature, the kind a city offers to bring filmmakers in and get a story shot on its streets. The catch is the deadline that we weren’t made aware of until recently. I have 30 days to get the whole film to a rough cut, or I pay every dollar back.

GOAL: 25 pages

ACTUAL: 14 pages

LESSONS LEARNED:

You lose 100% of the time you quit

Maybe you are sitting in front of your rough cut right now, thinking this will never be what I imagined, wondering if it is time to give up.

The only thing I know for certain…you will lose 100% of the times that you quit. When the footage fights you, when nothing lines up with the version in your head, walking away is the single choice that guarantees the film will never exist in a theater full of people. So you keep going. Even when it is ugly.

Especially when it is ugly.

I’m not in college anymore, Toto

I do not have the stamina to pull an all-nighter and then be up at six with my kids. (If anyone has tricks for getting children to sleep past sunrise, I am all ears.) So I pivoted.

I still stayed up late, but I learned my breaking point fast. I can burn the midnight oil two, maybe three nights a week before my brain turns to mush and I get diminishing returns. Past that point I am not editing anymore. I am just staring at the screen.

I have also started asking more of my girls, which is probably overdue. They are 10 and 12, plenty old enough to make their own breakfast and lunch and run their own laundry. Every chore they take back is a little more focus I get to pour into the cut.

Raising kids while also trying to continue this dream of filmmaking is an entire book I’d love to write someday.

Family comes first, every time

What I will not trade is family time.

I have six more summers before my oldest leaves the house (I’m gonna start crying now.) That means family comes first. My husband and I have always agreed on this, so completely that he quit his job and stayed home when we moved, just so he could help the girls settle into a new city and a new life.

No work. I want my girls to feel that I am still here, still theirs, even in the middle of the hardest creative push of my life.

Art takes time

No matter how hard I shoved, I could not force more than 24 hours into a day.

I am famous (mainly to myself 😅) for underestimating how long a task will take. It is the same reason I never work for a flat rate. I assume I should be faster, so I undersell myself. But after years of comparing notes with other filmmakers, I have finally made peace with the truth. This work just takes time. It is an art form, and art takes time.

So give yourself the same grace. You are not slow and you are not behind. You are making something, and making something was never supposed to be fast.

What’s next

Next week I am trying to close out one of the three projects on my plate this month, which should free me up to move through pages on BWK faster.

It would all be a different story if I could do this full time. But that is still a pipe dream, as every no-budget NonDē filmmaker reading this already knows. We are all in the same boat, trying to make a living while we make our art.

I filmed a reel about everything week one taught me. You can watch it here on Instagram.

Until next time,
Shawna Carroll