Echoes
Written by Veronica Cervantez
Directed by Leatrice Ching
Starring Arielle Schexnayder, Andrew Yanni
Release Date 2016
Story: The lull in a conversation allows unwanted memories and thoughts to linger on the surface.
Echoes was my first project where I had to direct a story chosen by other filmmakers and the first film where I needed to direct dialogue. It was for a club project at UCI, but I wanted to work with the same crew I’ve been collaborating with for years from PCC so Tanya Gonzalez, Princesa Garcia, Amy Wang, and Andrew Yanni joined me on this project. For us, it was a struggle to shoot everything in the scope of two days and this ultimately reflected on the final film. As Tanya had mentioned before in a conversation after the completion of the project, this was the first film where we really saw it go through 3 rewrites - once with the script, the second during production, and the most during editing. Although it was not ideal for us to edit a drastically different film from the script, it was a fun experience to see how much we could shape and alter the story from its original conception. Ironically enough, we thought that Echoes would be our last romance drama (at least for a while) tasked to us by other filmmakers, but it ended up being the practice we needed to attempt it again with Next Question (just a month and a half later).