A short film about the complexity of grief, the resilience of joy, community, and familial bonds.
LOGLINE
At the repast following his father’s funeral, Noah Butler (32) and the rest of the Butler family, grapple with the complex nature of their grief, and familial bonds, after the surprise arrival of their estranged uncle and brother-in-law.
STORY SUMMARY
Noah Butler (32) has gathered with his friends and family for the repast following the funeral of his father, Kenneth. Noah celebrates Kenneth’s life along with his older sister, SHERRI (36), desperately searching for joy to balance her sadness, and mother, SONYA (60), stoically enduring the loss of her husband while managing the emotions of her two children. As they navigate the very complicated crevasses of their grief in the immediate aftermath of the funeral for their father and husband, the three of them do what they can to comfort each other. Noah, feeling deep despair, struggles with the latent rage he feels and doesn’t know where to place. Feeling untethered, he turns to his two best friends Alex and John, but is unnerved by the ominous tone he hears coming from the sky. And when Noah’s estranged uncle James, whom the family hasn’t seen in years, arrives unexpectedly after not attending his brother’s funeral, Noah finds a target for his anger, and decides to wade into a conflict that began decades before he was born, even as James grapples with that fraught family history and his own regret about what he’s now lost.
TOPIC SUMMARY
I lost my father to Covid in 2021 and ever since I’ve been trying to find an outlet for the senselessness of that loss, as well as the things it uncovered, such as the weight of the past, the importance of familial bonds, those inherited as well as those chosen, and the resilience of joy. MORNING is about the complexity of grief, but also about the process of letting go and moving on, and how much strength it takes to do that. It’s about community and fostering joy in the face of sadness. It’s a film about the last four years, a time especially difficult for the Black community, and its impact on us. It’s about our pain and our resilience, and the people we love whom we may have lost, but also the people we love who are still here and who continue to love us back. This film is about how grief can make us feel untethered, and how love is able to bring us back to shore.
ARTISTIC APPROACH
Morning is a story about the complex and acute nature of grief and thus our creative choices will reflect that. Although this is a drama on its face, we will be introducing elements of magical realism through the use of sound, practical effects, and VFX. Throughout the course of the film, the sky will represent the ominous unknown. And Noah, Sherri, and James will each look toward it throughout the film as a mysterious tone, representing an ever-present feeling of dread, bears down on them. The tone will silence only once, at the end of the film, when Noah is able to release his anger and his love as he spontaneously bursts into flame and watches the sun rise on a new day. We’ll achieve this effect through a practical stunt, that we will then enhance using VFX. Because the sky is a character, the color palette will be comprised primarily of blacks, blues, and greens that will then begin to warm into reds and oranges as night falls and we begin to use more warm-hued tungsten light that we will try to motivate as practical lighting and transition away from the natural light we utilized in the earlier daytime scenes. In regard to camera, we will be shooting digitally on an Arri Alexa, utilizing wide shots, slow dolly moves, and long takes during key scenes. We’ll also manipulate the aspect ratio, starting at a letterboxed 2.40, which we will gradually widen scene by scene to a 1.78 as Noah’s community slowly brings him toward some level of catharsis by the end of the film. In addition to that, we will splice in real photographs of the director’s father, who has passed away and is the inspiration for this film, in key moments, representing our characters’ memory of the patriarch who has been lost.
CREATIVE DEPARTMENT HEADS
CINEMATOGRAPHER
RUBEN CONTRERAS
https://www.rubencinematography.com/
PRODUCTION DESIGNER
SANDRA B. RODRIGUEZ
https://www.sandrabrodriguez.com/
COSTUME DESIGNER
ALLISON CALHOUN
https://www.allisoncalhoun.com/
COMPOSER
JONGNIC BONTEMPS
CAST
LANDON MOSS as NOAH BUTLER
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8981178/
REGINA WILLIAMS as SONYA BUTLER
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0931513/
JASMINE SHANISE as SHERRI BUTLER
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7246374/
TONY J. SCOTT as JAMES BUTLER
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6922229/
ARMANI GREER as ALEX
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm11383717/
NACHBI LACOSSERIE as JOHN
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13967496/
WHAT WE NEED
Your contributions will be used in several ways through pre-production, production, and post-production to bring this film to life. Your donation will be used toward film equipment rentals, location costs, insurance, paying and feeding our crew, paying vendors, etc. Your donation will also help us with distribution costs after the film is made as we work to get this film seen and out into the world. Every dollar will be useful and put into the life of this film that we are making.
NOTE: Donations made through Indiegogo are NOT tax-deductible. If you wish to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit our Film Independent sponsored page.
https://www.filmindependent.org/sponsored-proje…
https://my.filmindependent.org/Morning
OTHER WAYS YOU CAN HELP
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