Just Desserts: A fairy tale

For someone taking a film and television degree, I feel I've really not talked enough about films, so to rectify this I talked to Karen Sloan although theres not much to go on (this is here is the only one she has online) she looks like she could become a talent to be contented with. What the film and then read her comentary.





Phil: What is the film about?

Karen: The short is about a girl who loves to bake who goes one day to meet up with her "true love" and discovers that he's been unfaithful. broken hearted she goes home to bake her pain away and in the end she gets her "just desserts"

Phil: How did the ideas develop?

Karen: The film was actually oddly inspired i guess by listening to the band cursive's song driftwood: a fairy tale, it's a song based on the story of pinocchio, and it made me start to think about the idea of creating the perfect lover...so that was sort of the basis and then i wanted to create a story that captured the magic of the fairytales i loved as a child, and things just sort of fell together and we went with ideas as they came, a lot of things were just spur of the moment, "let's try that"
type things that just worked.


Phil: What was the most difficult aspect of filming?

Karen: Filming was relatively easy. I worked on the project for about 6 months. I wrote, filmed, and edited it in april 05 for my video 2 final, spent the summer analyzing my mistakes and planning, and then re-shot in september. The difficult part with filming was probably finding times when my actors could meet, but it was a lot of fun because they were 2 of my best friends. The difficulty mainly was in editing and composing the music. Most of the special effects (glowing tear drops, dream bubbles, multiple cookie boys) weren't too difficult, but the opening credits, with the pages turning in the book, was a pain in the ass, it was composed of over 44 layers in adobe after effects and had a ridiculous amount of key framing and i rotoscoped the footage of me on the directed by page to make it look like it was illustrated (it's kind of hard to tell on youtube) also to enter my film in various competitions i had to use royalty free music, so i had to arrange loops in adobe audition to make my music...which was difficult for me personally, since i dont have a musically wired brain at all and i had a very clear idea of what i wanted the music to sound like.