Broken Vessel

Broken Vessel is a coming-of-age drama/ action short film. This is being made as our 4th year honours project at the University of Canterbury. The story is about a rebellious, feisty teenage girl, Brooklyn, who is struggling with her emotions and home life, and her Kungfu/ Taichi practicing neighbour, and longtime best friend, Ren. They are opposite personalities but balance each other. As Brooklyn is turning down a very different path to Ren, his worry for her puts tension on their friendship. 

My goal with crowdfunding is to help cover costs so we are able to tell our story in the best way possible, as our project is fully self-funded; as well as to create an audience for the project who will be excited to see it when it comes out and goes through the process of festival submissions! 

I (Alyssa Murphy) am the director and writer for this project. This is my second time directing, and I absolutely love being able to bring people together, getting to work with so many differnt creative people and sharing ideas and being able to tell meaningful stories through filmmaking! My Director of photography is Caleb Gilbert, who is a 4th year Digital screen student at the University of Canterbury also. Caleb is a talented DOP who is excited about creative ideas with lighting and lens choices with this film, as well as trying out shooting an action scene for the first time. My two producers are Joshua Kent and Junxi Cao, who are also 4th year students in our Digital Screen degree. Both Josh and Junxi are good hustlers and helping me with a producer-based mindset with the scope and feasibility of the project. The rest of my crew are all very talented at what they do so I am very excited to work with them! I also have five very talented actors, four of which will be in our one fight scene! For the fight scene we are mixing Kung fu tai chi style fighting with action style fighting which is a collaborative process where different people can show their strengths.

Our money that we are raising will go towards a few different things. Those being - feeding our crew and actors every day for our 5 days of shooting, buying props, costumes and materials to make props from, special camera and tech equipment, travel costs for actors, film festival submissions further down the track, and any additional money we have will go towards being able to give our actors, and stunt coordinator a thankyou gift. 

Broken Vessel at its core is about a teenage girl, Brooklyn who is struggling to navigate her emotions while growing up in an environment with added hardship of poverty, instability, and neglect and struggle with addiction. I was drawn to this idea because I wanted to explore the emotional complexity of teenagers, particularly for young women who face so many pressures at a time when they are already vulnerable. Myself and many other girls I knew and have talked to have struggled with emotions, confusion, loneliness and being misunderstood without the right tools and guidance to help and it can be really difficult. I also find there isn’t as many films about young, loud, girls, and I want girls and women to feel seen and represented on screen and to give a voice to the people who may otherwise be called dramatic or bossy or aggressive and to give an insight to others.

I also wanted to create a film and expand my own creative skills by exploring the kung fu-inspired aspect of my film and having an action scene in my film, along with still having a meaningful drama with characters and a story that you can feel within the short film. 

This film is aimed at audiences across New Zealand and Australia, particularly young women and people growing up in tough or unstable environments. Brooklyn’s journey is hopefully one that will connect to many young girls and young women and to reflect on their own journeys of figuring out identity and their place in a difficult time.