It’s not always easy to distinguish the boundaries of where something starts and where it ends. In fact, the majority of circumstances -from the simplest, to the more complicated- are under the influence of many parameters, that result in an inescapable untraceability of their two ends.

You take a person who goes from loving to drink, to making it a daily routine and finally becoming an alcoholic who joing the AA. But you can’t really pinpoint where the straight line becomes a slight turn, which evolves into a deadly U-turn.
Same goes to knowing another person, becoming physically attracted to him/her, creating a good relationship that might end with a brutal break up of the two -previously highly compatible- personalities.
Another person decides to leave his family home, in order to seek his much needed independence. But when is this exact point of being fed up and ready to search for a new home?

These may be a bit edgy examples, but highly portray the vast distance between the conscious and unconscious points of realization, in the millions of encounters that a mind goes through in daily basis. If you think about it, every single decision you make consists of an underlying substrate, that begins and ends the processing of every given situation before your conscious state of mind is aware of it and you get to act. To get this a step further, all we left with is a timespan in which the pre-decided thoughts that our minds make, are rendered by our conscious parts, which give us eligibility to act accordingly. I’m going to call this timespan “realization time“.

To put all of the previous talk into personal perspective, I’m going to describe an example of my own. It begins nearly a year and a half ago. I’m at my first year in the film school and have decided to shoot my first short film, in production-like circumstances. The script was actually written even longer ago, about a year before I joined the film school. We gave it 5 days of shooting, during which I was really ecstatic. Literally all of the money I had (around 700 euros) went to renting our gear and other production expenses. But I honestly didn’t care at all if I was left with zero money to fulfill this dream.

And then it came. The nightmare day. When almost everything was below average. From the dialogues and the decoration, to the way we lighted and shot the scene. That day left a scar. It took me nearly two months to edit the footage and every time I encountered the bad part, I wanted to stop and leave the room. I knew beforhand that I was going to record a voiceover and that took me another four months to accomplish. At that time, I tought I had moved on from this project and that it would not live to see a final cut. When I had the voiceover in my hands, the dialogues were awfully striking out and needed to be dubbed (I shot the film in English, with Greek actors). One obstacle behind another. I was moving in circles. Other script ideas stayed in shelves during this period of time and even worse, some of them couldn’t find their way out, from my head to a textbook.

Realization time finally hit me long after that. It came disguised as a woman. She was an actor I met by chance during my summer vacation and was willing to do the dub for me. I had to do this once and for all, to put an end to it and move on. And so, we recorded it, I made the final changes and rendered it. The End.

Now, to most people, this little story might not mean much, but for me it was a huge chapter of my life that had to close and finally did. I certainly learned numerous things from that experience, which would mean considerably less, hadn’t I finished the film. Probably the most valuable lesson I got is that, once you realise the pros and cons of your situation and embrace them with honesty, there’s virtually nothing that can touch you or affect you in a bad way afterwards.

This is Dead End Angels.

Enjoy!