Ryan Turner, Izzy Ezagui, and Ian Blake Newhem have recently launched a Kickstarter for their dark comedy short film “Pull Yourself Together”. The short film focuses on the story of a tortured man who digs up his past – literally.
Ryan Finlay – Fin – is a wreck. A car crash left the once-talented artist without direction, without hope, and without his left arm. What remains of his body “survived” but he’s not really alive. He wiles away his time in a derelict apartment, totally alone. He mopes, drinks, and pathetically reminisces about all he lost. Drinks some more.
But when he can’t find at the bottom of a bottle what’s missing from his life, he winds up in a dark place. He must feed his unusual addiction—and he can’t do that alone. He needs a hand.
Mark, an unlikely brother-in-arms, is trying to help Fin pull himself together. Their mutual salvation is buried in a bio-hazard bag in Fin’s backyard. Or it was …
Pull Yourself Together is about how our past, even when it amputates something vital, makes us whole. It’s about phantoms behind the faces we show.
Izzy conceived the idea for Pull Yourself Together in an attempt to work through something that’s often on his mind. He doesn’t see himself this way, but people have a tendency to title him “hero.” But how would he have handled the trauma, the pain, the confusion that comes with such a traumatic loss, if he didn’t have the support of that title? What would it be like to deal with names like “monster” instead? What if his injury reminded him daily of a terrible judgment call, a flaw in his character, a momentary lapse that a lifetime of repentance could never take back?
Thanks to some genius talent working on the project for the sheer thrill and obvious potential of it, we were able to make Pull Yourself Together. With the help of favors from friends and a talented crew, we were able to shoot what would have cost $100,000 for $30,000. Challenge is, we raised only $20,000 among us. The film is in the can, but all that “post” stuff will require that last third or so to put us over the top and to make the film pop the way it deserves.
In order to finish this movie we need help funding these departments:
Sound Design, Sound Mixing, Color, Music, VFX, Graphics, Music Licensing, and Festival Fees.
We’ve been involved in other projects that were crowd-powered—and we love this concept, as well as the results. It’s the way the world is moving—especially indie films. Besides, we’re talking about a short. We’re on our lonesome here. No studios or distributors backing us (yet). What we need is buzz. We need a bunch of humans who see the potential here in what we’ve done, and who are willing to join us in creating this inspirational, meaningful story, and bringing it into the public.
