The making of TRICK | How we made an award-winning short film in 3 months

The cast and crew of Trick after our win at the Rack Focus Dallas film competition.

In case you’ve been living under a rock recently, a short film I worked on, Trick, won Best Film at the Rack Focus Dallas film festival.  I know what you’re thinking: “Robert, you write prose fiction? How did you manage to bring a film to life?”

It’s like this, chickadees. I’ve been deeply interested in movies ever since I was a kid — particularly horror. When I started cutting me teeth as a fiction writer, I knew I wanted to eventually explore screenplays as well. Over the past few years, I’ve read several books on the topic to get familiar with that art form. You see, writing a screenplay is a lot different from writing prose. It’s in a different format, there are different rules at play for what works and what doesn’t, and it uses a completely different writing muscle in your brain. As with anything, you can read about a topic all you want, but you ain’t gonna learn it ‘til you actually do the damn thing. To practice, I turned a few of my prose pieces into screenplays to see if I could learn the ropes. Turns out I could. I showed the scripts to a few people in the biz and none of them told me they were horrible. At least to my face, lol. I took that as a cue from the universe to continue on.

Still, I didn’t know how to make that next big leap toward creating an actual film. It didn’t take a genius to realize I wouldn’t be able to do it alone.

Movie poster for Trick designed by Christina Rodgriguez.

I needed a partner that knew the ropes and found the perfect one in Shrader Thomas. At the time, we hadn’t even met yet — I only knew him through social media. All I knew was he was gay, like me. Into horror, like me. We met for lunch. It turned out he was really down to earth — also like me. We hit it off immediately. Turns out he was working on a short film of his own called Loose Ends at the time. Our conversation inspired me, and we chatted briefly about doing a film together sometime. Shortly after that, his film won first place in the Austin Revolution film competition. Clearly, the guy was talented.

A few months later, the Rack Focus film competition started gearing up. If you’ve never heard  of Rack Focus, it’s a Dallas-based competition that gives amateur filmmakers three months to create a short film not to exceed ten minutes in length. Now in its 15th year, Rack Focus is a great way to get a film out into the world. Anyway, the clock started ticking. Shrader and I teamed up to do our thing.

Together, we worked out the idea for the film we wanted to create. It wasn’t easy — both he and I had to work around our full-time day jobs during hellishly-busy periods for us both. We knew we wanted to do a horror film with gay characters. We wanted something that felt instantly relatable but also had an underlying strangeness: think Ryan Murphy as seen through a David Lynchian lens. Given that we had a super-tight timeline, almost no budget and limited resources, we came up with a story that fit those constraints. Our film would star two characters in one location. The story for Trick started coming together: a man hooking up with a mysterious stranger gets more than he bargained for when the date goes awry.

After multiple rounds of tweaks, Shrader and I knew we had a script we were excited about.

That’s me on the left, writer and producer of Trick. My main man, director Shrader Thomas, on the right.

Then we had to figure out how to bring the film to life. A team started to coalesce around us through networking and more than a few happy accidents. We were so lucky to meet other aspiring filmmakers who wanted to contribute their talents to the film. There are too many to mention here, but I have to call out Trevor VanArsdale, Bill Poindexter, Nathan and Maddy Menser, Eugene Hawkins, Johnny Ortega, Jörg Viktor Steins-Lauß, Trey Patton and so many others. We shot over two days in late August at my home in Dallas. Although the film is only 10 minutes long, it took us about 28 hours of work time to capture the footage. I couldn’t be happier with the talent and professionalism of the crew. Everyone seemed genuinely excited about the project and worked hard to bring the film to life.

With Trick complete, we premiered it at the festival back in September. There were 13 films in the competition and some seriously good contenders. Did we expect to win? Certainly not. All we knew was we worked our butts off to make Trick as good as we could. In the end, that’s really all you can control. I could tell from the audience reaction during the premier that people liked it. When we won, it was a surreal moment. My heart was thumping like a jackrabbit on crack, and you could hardly see Shrader’s eyes he was grinning so big.

So, what has the whole experience taught me? That I’m a creative individual down to my core, even though I sometimes don’t give myself enough credit for it. That I’m comfortable hanging out with other creative people and doing creative things. That I’m capable of pushing myself more than I thought I could. That I need to keep testing the limits of what I can do, even if it’s sometimes uncomfortable. On some level, making that film changed me. It was something  I would have never thought was possible a few years ago. Now I’m looking down the pike to see what else I can do.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this article and  want to see Trick, I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. It won’t be available to the public for a few months at least. Shrader and I want to enter it into a few other festivals. Which means we need to keep that element of surprise, at least for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we’ll be able to show it to you around springtime.

Before I wrap up, I’ve got to give a shout out to Shrader Thomas for bringing me into the fold, showing me the ropes, and helping me get Trick out into the world. It was a dream working with you, bud. Hope we can do it again soon.

Thanks for reading. I’ll post again soon. Until then, keep it spooky.

Click here to learn more about the Rack Focus Dallas Film Competition.