“Why is the Grim Reaper Hot?” -by Rodolfo Zuniga
Hi there, my name is Rodolfo Zuniga and I’m one of the winners of our studio’s first ever script writing competition. My short film is “Why is the Grim Reaper Hot?”. It is about a man who is visited by the Grim Reaper. But then he discovers that the Grim Reaper is a beautiful woman so he asks her out on a date.
I always found it funny when an actor is too attractive for the role they are playing. So I combined this comedy bit with my love of stories involving characters being visited by death. What also helped me write this story was the budget. It allowed me to keep the story simple, I only had two characters and one location in my script. I’m still shocked that I even finished a short film script. Quick little backstory, I only ever saw myself as an actor not a writer. I tried my hand at writing when I first bought Final Draft Pro two years ago (it was on sale). I wanted to write sketches but I gave up after writing only a quarter of a page. I thought to myself “I’m not a writer, I’m only an Actor”. When Shannon announced this competition, I figured “ maybe I should give this another shot”. To my surprise, I actually won. But then the fear kicked in, “I actually have to make this thing”.
I was able to find a film crew pretty quickly. They are friends that I have worked with over the years. The location was easy as well because we used my house.The most eye-opening experience of making this film was the casting process. I’m playing the lead but I had to look for a lead actress. Obviously we have wonderful actresses enrolled at the studio but I wanted to expand the search and see as as many actresses as possible. So I submitted the project to Actors Access and I ended up receiving over fifteen hundred submissions for this one role! There were so many submissions, I couldn’t click on all their profiles, so their headshot had to grab me. Having a film reel also helped greatly in deciding because it gives you the chance to see how the actor looks and sounds on camera. I ended up choosing about two hundred actresses to audition for the role. Half of them accepted the audition and submitted a self tape. It was a surreal experience watching actresses perform the lines that I wrote. After watching all the self tapes, we called in about thirty actresses for a callback. Half came in person to the studio and the other half were through Zoom. The funny thing is the actress we cast was one of the first callbacks we saw. She did a wonderful job and honestly felt right for the role. Even though we could only cast one actress, “booking the room” was in full effect for a lot of the actresses. They did such a wonderful job, I want to write something for them in the future.
On the day of shooting, it went amazing. I had a film crew that I trust, an extremely talented lead actress and the best acting coach in the world. In a strange way, it was kind of anticlimactic because everything went so smoothly. Shannon is right, when you do your work it just comes naturally. Even if I messed up a take, we just shot it again. We were able to shoot it all in one day, we started at about 10am and finished a little after 7pm. We are currently in post production and hopefully people get to see it in a couple of months. I’m nervous and excited for people to watch it.
As always, I’m eternally grateful to Shannon for providing this amazing opportunity. I can now annoy people by calling myself an Actor/Writer. Thank you for reading my blog!
