"Burnt Grass" directed by Ray Wong
"Burnt Grass" is a subtle sci-fi drama that shuns special FX in favor of a strong premise and a thrilling narrative.
Inspired to create his story after dating a girl with an identical twin sister led to fears he’d one day mix them up, Wong presents a thought-provoking premise. What would you do in this situation? Would you use the power to your own advantage or would you just walk away?
In an interview on Directors Notes, Wong admits that budget constraints dictated his approach to the film's production, but the story certainly doesn't suffer for it. In fact, the story may have been forced to new heights of ingenuity out of necessity.
“When you are constrained by the size of your budget you are forced to find other ways to tell your sci-fi tale, and focus on things like story and character, which is the most important thing anyway. I love the idea of stripping everything down to its essentials and telling your story with just the necessary pieces in front of you. If you can plant the idea of what this sci-fi mechanism is early on, you never really have to go back to it again, because you let the audience do the work and it gives you the freedom to explore the relationships in front of you. We knew we could never afford high-end ways of approaching the visual effects especially when it came to doubling the Sally’s. All we could really do were split screen and body double techniques. So the challenge was to figure out how to utilize those in a way that wasn’t so glaring to the audience. If you can hide it in the storytelling and the performance, these low-fi techniques go a long way. Alex Paxton-Beesley who played Sally was really amazing and her performances hopefully made the audience forget that process. You really just believe the two of them are interacting with each other for real. In fact many people have come up to us and asked if we actually shot with twins.”
"Sally and Jack, a young couple in the city, discover a strange phenomenon in their backyard that duplicates organic life. Sally quickly envisions its wild possibilities, while Jack suffers its consequences."
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