A short film first, then the world

Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey are the director/producer team behind the Oscar-nominated short Miracle Fish. They are currently in post-production for Cryo, a science fiction short that will complement the story – and hopefully help finance – their first feature, Cargo.

LUKE: Miracle Fish opened up a lot of doors, especially with the funding bodies in Australia and generating interest from agents and studios overseas. It thrust us into a world we knew in theory, and suddenly we were taking pretty significant meetings. I’ve got several things happening at once and they’re not all going to happen at the same time, so I’m keeping my finger in quite a few pies.
We’ve spent all of this year trying to figure out our options and what to pursue, because by January next year, when the Oscar nominations are announced, nobody is going to care anymore. There’s definitely a short life span [of notoriety] that has to be exploited, and we’re trying to ride it for everything it’s worth.

The short is still blazing along, having a great life, which was greatly unexpected. We shot it with money we sourced from overseas (from MTV Italy and its defunct QOOB channel), so we actually just got it in the can and sent a rough cut to Sundance, and they accepted it. Then Screen Australia came in and gave us post-production funding to help us finish it in a limited amount of time.
Next thing we knew, we were sitting at the screening in Utah, not having even seen the final version. We’ve just shot another short called Cryo, a parallel story to what happens in our feature Cargo; it’s
set on board a spaceship and it’s about having to make a decision whether you sacrifice yourself for the greater good in very extreme circumstances. The hardest part is to come up with a self-contained short that won’t feel like trailer for a bigger one; one that works on its own merits.
The plan is to get Cryo into festivals and then return to the US and any other financiers here and try to sell it – and Cargo – off the back of our Oscar reputation.

My advice to other filmmakers? Make sure your idea and execution are in perfect harmony with your budget and resources. Work out the strategy for its release, monitor how it’s going and reassess constantly.