A man rushes through the night in a desperate attempt to save a kidnapped woman from his past.

Flint was Kyle Borg and I’s graduation film, which ended up being the biggest enterprise we’d ever undertaken then.

We are both obsessed with Noir, so it was only a matter of time before we made a noir short. Very early on, our inspirations narrowed down to a variety of semi-noir or neo-noir films, like Drive, Cowboy Bebop and London to Brighton. We did not want to fall back into the 1950s noir films, who are often imitated, but never equalled.

We wanted to be ambitious with this piece and make the most of everything we’d learned over the past three years of university. I hand-picked every one of the 23 crew members that worked on the film. I had worked with each of them at least once and I knew what I could expect from them. Similarly, two of our our main actors, Gus Mills and Edward Glennie, were known to me from the past few years.

Through an unfortunate turn of circumstance, we were still without a Cinematographer a week before the planned shoot dates. I decided to take on the role, hoping that with Kyle co-directing, I could split my attention and remain efficient. Even so, I still relied heavily on Sam, my gaffer, and Calum, my 1st AC. Working with a limited lighting package, we relied heavily on high key setups, for very strong shadows. In their moments of quiet, we bathed our characters in yellow, sodium-esque light to mark a strong contrast with the rest of the film.

Our Composer, Jonas Roth, an old friend, gave us the finest neo-noir soundtrack. With clear synthwave influence a la Drive, but playing it simple, with a lovely emotional theme that makes us sympathise with Flint in spite of little knowledge of his character.

One of our pillars during the screenwriting process for Kyle and I was playing with the classic Noir “damsel in distress” trope. We wanted to both play into and subvert audience expectations. Flint’s goal is not exactly Lisa, and Lisa is far from helpless. It was always important to us to make her a full fledged character, someone not too dissimilar from Cowboy Bebop’s Faye Valentine. Julie was a perfect choice for the role. She juggled Lisa’s playfulness in the interrogation scenes and her physicality and calculating side and defeated the genre conventions’ attempts at keeping her in the damsel box.

FLINT

Starring Duncan Taylor, Edward Francis Glennie, Julie Charleston and Gus Mills
Written and Directed by Kyle Borg and Clement Jochem
Director of Photograpy: Clement Jochem

Shot on Red Scarlet