Panicky, pulsing music plays as a man runs down a street, covered in blood. A tape labeled “Watch me” lies in the gutter, intriguing a passerby. A man rapes a woman with the help of her girlfriend. A barista gets fired for serving a customer whole milk rather than skim in her latte.
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Jason Stephens began thinking about the project last spring. An arts management grad student at Columbia College, he founded the nonprofit organization Split Pillow a year ago to promote “improv filmmaking”–productions acted, directed, edited, and sometimes scripted on the fly. Split Pillow had already put together “The Challenge,” an event in which writers were given 12 hours to produce short scripts that were then filmed and edited in another 48. Over 100 people participated, and the results were screened at Heaven Gallery in Wicker Park. But, Stephens says, “we wanted to create something a bit different, something that would require Chicago-based filmmakers to collaborate on a larger scale.”
Stephens eventually assembled 11 teams involving around 75 participants for the project, many of them veterans of “The Challenge”; shooting took place over 11 weeks beginning in July (editing on the final cut of the film carried into the fall). Split Pillow’s volunteer staff coordinated schedules, helped scout locations, and provided editing equipment and DV cameras to those who needed them, but apart from actors’ fees of $5 per chapter, the teams were responsible for their own funding.
