After an eventful day in the park, two teenage boys find a rift in their friendship when the power dynamic in their relationship shifts. This is the premise for senior Liam Hall’s short film, “Tri Ciga.”
Hall produced the eight-minute short film while abroad at the Film and Television School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague last fall with two collaborators, Matias Breuer of Vassar College and Zackary G. Mejias of American University.
“We started with this idea that we wanted to have a power imbalance in a relationship and to have that inverted over the course of the movie,” Hall said. “We kind of just were traveling around Prague aimlessly just spitballing different activities for teenage boys to do and we worked from there.”
“Tri Ciga” features three different scenes, and in each one a cigarette is lit making the title — Czech slang for “three cigs” — fitting.
The team used the setting of Prague and the cold atmosphere to their advantage, as well as the culture and history of the country.
“As far as our story goes, I think Prague was a really good setting for what the story we told was,” Hall said. “Someone we showed the film to said the relationship between the characters could be read as the relationship between the Russians and the Czechs during the communist era, which is something we had never thought about.”
Since filming finished, “Tri Ciga” has received attention from different film festivals, winning Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director at the 2015 Trinity Film Festival in Connecticut.
Most recently, Hall and his collaborators attended the New Orleans Film Festival for the Narrative Shorts category Oct. 14-22. Though they didn’t take home any prizes, Hall said it was humbling just being there, considering there is no student category and the festival only accepted 2 percent of films submitted.
Being one of the youngest groups there, Hall had the opportunity to watch other impressive films, make connections and get a professional response to “Tri Ciga.”
“That’s kind of the first time I’ve gotten feedback from someone who’s in the industry that has no reason to tell me my work is good and to have genuinely positive things to say about it,” Hall said. “It’s just really reaffirming.”
Next, Hall will head to the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington Nov. 11-15. According to Movie Maker Magazine, it’s one of the 25 best film festivals in the world.
Senior Amory Parks, who was also on the Prague study abroad program, had the opportunity to see “Tri Ciga” during its premiere screening in December 2014.
“Everyone’s projects were impressive, especially considering that they were made in a foreign country and foreign language in a relatively brief period of time, but ‘Tri Ciga’ was the stand-out film,” Parks said. “The story is simple but with an effective twist, and the progression of the characters, and specifically their power dynamic, is strong and poignant.”
To produce “Tri Ciga,” Hall and his team needed to overcome a few obstacles. The dialogue is entirely in Czech, a language Hall and his collaborators were not familiar with.
To get beyond this barrier, the team wrote the script in English, then translated it and had a professor and actors restructure it to fit Czech dialogue better than a direct translation.
Instead of listening to the words, Hall was more concerned with how they would be conveyed on camera.
“It’s kind of a double edged sword because on one hand its good because you only focus on what was seen rather than the words,” Hall said. “But then again were mostly showing this film to people who don’t speak Czech.”
In addition to the language barrier, Hall and his team faced a variety of challenges when filming outside. They scheduled filming during three of the coldest days of the year where it snowed in between takes, meaning they had to dust away snow an hour before shooting for the second day.
They also faced obstacles like choosing the actors from headshots alone, one of the actors twisting his knee — causing them to reblock a scene — and running out of film on the first day of shooting.
Despite these difficulties, Hall said working on “Tri Ciga” with his group was a seamless collaboration — so much so that he plans on living with Breuer, his co-director, after he graduates and creating a feature film on the smallest possible budget.
Hall has never worked on a feature film before, but though the task is quite daunting, he said he’s ready to jump in and see what happens.
“The thing I always think about with this film is that a year ago, I went to Prague and I didn’t know anyone that was making films that was going from Elon and I met two of my now best friends,” Hall said. “Just how incredible it is that we all formed this group randomly and it was the most rewarding collaborative experience I have ever had.”