"Busking" short film production

Title: Busking

Format: Short Film

Genre: Supernatural - Mystery - Thriller

Logline: A young woman goes busking in her usual spot in an old brick railway arch but this time she attracts a very unusual audience.

A short film about the stories that coincide, overlap and clash in the big city.

Not just in space but also through time...

/ˈbʌskɪŋ/

noun

the activity of playing music in the street or another public place for voluntary donations

Hello there!

I'm writer + director Joe Ryan. I work at Ravensbourne University, South-East London, UK. A place which has a phenominal turnover of great film students, trained in all disciplines of the film-making process.

I am not a professional but I've spent my adult life dipping in and out of film-making (shorts, sketches, music vids etc) and have always tried to produce with the most ardent DIY ethic; art for art's sake.

And this is my latest film project, for which I want to do the right thing and pay a fine crew a fine wage. Including cast. Yes, we can all make films on a shoestring and smile and accept praise for doing something with nothing. I've done it before, we've all done it before. BUT that requires a lot of free labour from a lot of people. Thus far I have recruited a lot of great and talented team members at the start of their careers and I'd like to pay them a good industry standard fee for their hard work. This is mostly what the money is needed for. Location hire, catering, travel are also cost considerations.

Despite these expenses we are still keeping costs way down in the equipment and costume areas.

"Busking" has been in pre-production a long time and is a short-form spooky supernatural film about a young woman who goes busking with her guitar in an old brick railway arch, on this particular day she is visited by an audience of an altogether ghostly variety.

Story Background:

This story started life on the short-form horror story website “Creepypasta.com” where it recieved high praise and rating by users and was even turned into an audio-story (unprompted) on youtube by at least two different content creators.

Originally written on a whim, for fun, I had been pondering an interesting location which could provide fear and suspense.

Someone on their own, vulnerable to the mistreatment of strangers, a busker, seemed like an interesting and original character, and their situation; at once on show to the world but very isolated seemed to me a fascinating setup for familiar feelings of awkward unease which could be magnified into tension and horror.

Transition from prose to screenplay:

Years after writing I decided to turn this story into a live action short-film, and found this would neccessitate changing some of the events, fleshing out the characters, creating a few new ones, and gradually the tone and theme of the story changed. Originally the main underlying theme or message of the story was something to the effect of don’t judge others by what you see. But now has become an observation on the idea that in places like big cities everybody’s personal stories are infinitely overlapped with everyone else’s.

Why does this story matter now?

Divisions and clashes may be familiar in any society, particularly built-up urban settings like the one in “Busking”. But right now much of the world feels undeniably divided, with people’s different personal experiences apparently impossible to reconcile.

We suggest here that our personal stories are all playing out at the same time and overlapping, interacting and clashing. We simply render the ghosts of our mutual past literally, to explore acceptance and tolerance.

The Project:

This project is more than just a short film.

It is part of a research project I am undertaking which aims to demonstrate the value in regular high-end short film productions hosted within and supported by Ravensbourne University, as per a professional production company, with the view to creating an actual in-house production company down the line. Something which will annually give talented and driven students and graduates the opportunity to work on a professional film or two and actually get paid properly and not just receive a simple credit.