Written and directed by Bobby Burton
Twin Flame is a short genre piece about Dante and Beatrice, a criminal power-couple. Dante is a hotshot swordsman and Beatrice is an expert hacker. Their main goal in the four-minute short film is to obtain a powerful piece of technology from a weapons dealer.
The process of making this short was pretty straightforward. I started with the vague idea of two criminals in a relationship, inspired by Bonnie and Clyde and other similar stories. I am very interested in production design so I knew I wanted to incorporate some interesting props and settings. This is how I came up with Beatrice’s hacker room and the sci-fi energy core that the weapons dealer owns. My main goal of this short film was to try and show as much of the character’s personalities as I could through the production design. I finalized the script after 2 drafts and the rest of the preproduction was pretty uneventful. Finding locations, finding crew, making/finding props, scheduling everything, etc. Shooting went pretty smoothly too, aside from some parts taking longer than expected.
Considering that there was no budget and the crew and actors were all just friends who agreed to help, I’m extremely happy with the final product. There are a few things that I overlooked during shooting like focus issues and camera placement that I am unhappy with, but I will learn from those mistakes and not repeat them in the future. There are also a few extra shots I wish I got, but hindsight is 20/20. I’m beyond grateful to everyone that helped out and I’m looking forward to making something even better in the future.
CREDITS: Greyson Bishop- Dante, Ania Sharzipan- Beatrice, Alwyn Tay- Weapons Dealer, Lily Nguyen- Assistant Director, Benji Rhodes- Assistant Camera, Lucas Tam- Behind the Scenes Photography, Andy Roman- Boom, Youwon Shin- Tascam Op, Ryan Richards- Grip, Maalik Brown- Slate, Corey Quarles- Slate