iterate

We follow four copies of a resume, desperately trying to find acceptance at an office before being changed.

CHALLENGING THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY

Toy Story did it. Wreck-It Ralph did it. Inside Out did it. Barbie did it. We just wanted to join the countless others in personifying the inanimate. Instead of anything with a face or personality or vibe or even color, let’s bring a resume to life. The sales pitch of an individual’s life. What would a resume want? To be accepted. What would it fear? To be rejected. What happens when you update your resume? Call it a makeover. Call it plastic surgery. Call it what you want, but it is now changed. We embody our resumes until they need to be improved, the goal post is moved, and we aspire to become what we say we are all over again. The resume’s life is to be replaced.

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

For all intents and purposes, this film is a silent one. A first and only film of ours without a line of dialogue or narration. Providing a distance between the audience and the characters, we maintain the objective, impersonal judgment of the resume as he gets rejected that a recruiter flooded with thousands of applications might deploy. This cold tone was enough to ruffle the feathers of one such job recruiter in the audience. He didn’t feel like it was a fair portrayal of the process.

STARRING

Lucas Moss Kyle Olson

Allen Washington Tomar Boyd

Matthew Seymour Aly Jay

Kaprina Zachary Lindsey Raelle

Avery Mitchell Jameka Lewis

Deborah Keene Morgan Bowling

Ja’ness Tate Bobbie Kizer

Kamen Tsvetkov Jernelle Shaw

Marian Lee Megan Pitts

Nonlinear

A NEW WAY TO TELL A STORY

This film utilizes a narrative structure that mirrors the layout of an average resume. It starts with a summary and bullet points of the complete story. What follows are sections of “experience”, where the more recent sections are viewed first, so there are sequences of the movie that play linearly, and then we go back to a sequence that takes place before that previous section. This technique of playing events forward and backward leaves the audience feeling an incomplete grasp of the events, which highlights the underlying ineffectiveness of a resume to begin with.