Hello there! We are the Severed Bond Team and our project is a film that delves into the deep relationship between father and child, specially, the broken relationship between the two. Our team consists of many department heads such as myself, Vinh Yang, the Director of the film from FITV. Mary Amoroso as our Producer (FITV), Kelsey Buneta as our Production Designer (FITV) and Branton Tellez (FITV) as our Director of Photography and Jacob Montano as our Film Composer (MEIS).  

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In the Severed Bond Team, we strive to help each other in pushing our creative thoughts. In every step of the way, from pre-production all the way to production and post-production, we are constantly trying new ways to make our film the best it can through criticism and support.  

Our film is about the trauma caused between a father and son due to the father’s negligence towards his son. This in turn reminds the father of his own childhood and how he didn’t have a good parental figure himself and is causing the same damage towards his son. After this realization, the father attempts to reforge an already broken bond between the two. With much time and many attempts, he finally gets a chance to open up towards his son for one last time as they are separated forever. In the end, the son, instead of taking after his father and grandfather’s lack of parenting, he learns to break the generational trauma and holds himself a good relationship with his son many years later.  

Our Pre-production process had many bumpy roads but we were able to overcome them due to our cooperation as a team. Such as an example, we were able to look at our script thoroughly, incorporating many of our crew’s thoughts on how we can further push the dynamic relationship between the father and the son. Taking up to a whole month of rewrites and drafts, we were able to take out unnecessary elements and add in dramatic elements as well. This is when we were able to find the base of the message when we introduced the idea of generational trauma as we took the broken relationship between father and son up level up with grandfather and father. We believe this gave more insight into the emotional damage of not only the son but also the father as well. This idea came from the fact that many of us also face similar situations now or in the past with our father, as it didn’t matter of our race or gender, sometimes parents aren’t good at being parents which most likely or not was because of their own parents. This made us think about how the lack of parental influence or bad parental figure might affect us to become similar to them.  

So with our new script and a topic/message that hasn’t been delved on much, we were ready to move forward with our project. The next thing we needed to do was get our talents, storyboards, locations, mood boards, etc. The main point of focus is probably the storyboard as that is another big point of collaboration. Mainly with myself and my cinematographer, we came together to bring forth how the film will look. Down to every movement and camera lens, we try to look and plan everything. During the creation of the storyboard, I dealt with the story aspects of the shots and how they could pull out the characters emotions while my cinematographer looked towards the lighting of the shot and the shots needed for coverage. During this process we also happened to link in elements of our own personal experience with our father as well. Being in a Asian household, my father was almost a basis of the character in the film and thus I tried to make all of the shots have a feeling of familiarity. Being the non-caring, negligence and result caring father that I have, I tried to put his character elements into the story. This is when my cinematographer also had ideas to add in elements of his own father. He comes from a Mexican household and was able to give more depth to the character, adding in goal orientated traits and absent minded. This all then reflect in the storyboards as we try to integrate the movements of the shot to show the uncaring of the father.  

Finally, we finished up everything else and even got a more diverse cast during the auditions in which we found a man named Hardy Louihis, a black military veteran who dealt with similar father issues himself. Hardy is very kind, hardworking and an amazing actor with just the right tone we were looking for in the film. Currently, we’re in the process of production in which we should finish filming by February and finish editing, color and score the film by March. We had many bumps in the way but we’re determined to make this film and we’re all excited to work on this together.