Laura Hunter Drago

Getting into Film Independent’s Project Involve fellowship presented us with a huge career opportunity and a daunting challenge: the program brings together creatives from different disciplines who start as complete strangers and work together over the course of a year to make a short film.

Every coffee meetup or Zoom I have with a friend in “the industry” right now is the same. “Ugh, I just don’t know…” “Do you think next year will really be better?” “Should we even live in Los Angeles anymore?” “A lot of days it feels like there’s no point to working on anything if no one will ever see it.” The last couple of years have been rough on everyone.

Making a movie is a daunting task, making a movie for less than $20,000 with only 3 days of production is… a really daunting one. When we set out to make To the New Girl, a stage-to-screen adaptation of a play that one of my best friend’s from high school, Samantha Macher, wrote we knew that both the costs and schedule were going to be tight. We also knew that it was vital to the project that we work with as many women as possible.