Jake's Senior Thesis Film: Verbatim

Hi everyone!

For my last semester at UMass before I graduate, we are making a short film version of my award-winning, feature-length screenplay, Verbatim!

I hope that with the short, I will be able to successfully pitch and one day produce the feature-length version, which aims to achieve some long-overdue justice for sexual assault survivors and shine a light on both the terrible things they have to endure as well as how brave all of them are.

Verbatim is a film about eighteen year-old Casey and the psychological trauma and social backlash she suffers after being raped the night before her high school graduation. The short film version will begin after she is dragged to the ER by her parents and forced to come face-to-face with what happened for the first time.

The funding will be used for us to rent a Blackmagic Pocket 4K, 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm T1.5 Rokinon Xeen lenses, a 1TB Samsung external SSD to record all of the footage onto, and as well as to feed our cast and crew for the two-day shoot, all of whom are wonderful and talented friends of mine!

Our current tentative shooting dates are Saturday, March 16th & Sunday, March 17th, with the finished short being up on Vimeo to watch by mid April!

While it will be a dream come true for me to see the characters I have written come to life, what's more important is the people I set out to help when I began to write Verbatim over two and a half years ago. One in six women will be a victim of sexual assault in her lifetime, meaning in America every 98 seconds someone is sexually assaulted. This epidemic has reached way too many people I know, and I will have all of them in my heart when I say thank you for even considering to donate; they are all beautiful and powerful individuals and I hope with this film we can do right by them.

Thank you so much for reading - I love you all!
Jake