Fostering Challenge-Ready Creativity

A case study on Stripped with Joelle Dong

“Everything went wrong, it was glorious” says Joelle, when speaking of her experience of getting a chance to write and direct her first ever film - all while just being an intern at Five Fifty Five. We speak to her regarding her top 3 lessons learnt while in the process of creating her first independent short, titled Stripped.

Here are Joelle’s top 3 lessons learnt from her experience.

Lesson #1 : Anything is possible with enough will and flexibility (Stripped was produced within the span of 14 days, during the middle of which I was almost deported––so many times it seemed the film would not get shot. I had to modify the story up until day-of shooting as we ran out of time for crucial shots)

Lesson #2 : Time is everything––schedules can always be fixed (we ended up having less time at locations than anticipated, actors arrived late, our anticipated production manager was unable to make it last minute, and our AD had never AD-ed before so we were always off-schedule. I was constantly adding and subtracting minutes, reworking shots and we managed to wrap as scheduled.)

Lesson #3 : Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and that’s the beauty of it (Our lead actor wound up in the hospital for back pain, I was on the phone with the NHS helping him while the rest of the cast & crew grabbed a second dinner. Kate had to rush over after her performance and accompany him to the hospital, he healed and we scheduled a re-shoot for the next week. Meanwhile, our sound recordist had a nervous breakdown and absconded with the audio files. After returning to the States, I found a wonderful Brown alum who helped us fix sound we’d gotten off the camera)