RAD DAD, 2023, 13 min.
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Director - Zach Weintraub
Producer/Cinematographer - Ian Clark
Starring Zach Weintraub and Frances Eister Weintraub
Featuring Taylor Reed, Matt Lemier, Ian Killelea, and Jackson Nobody
Titles by Casey Jones
Sound design by Matt Scott Baker
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A sesh with the boys would make dad glad. But if dad can’t get rad, then will he be sad?
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In 2021, I had a baby. This event obviously brought many changes and feelings. In terms of making movies specifically, it brought fear and anxiety that perhaps I'd reached the end of the line. To combat this, I started writing a feature - my first such endeavor since 2014. After a few false starts, it came relatively easily and I liked what I wrote. My longtime friend and collaborator Ian Clark came onboard. I arranged a month-long leave of absence with my job. The cast started coming together...
But meanwhile, I wasn't happy at work and had started to look for a new job. This search paid off far quicker than expected, and suddenly I had to choose between making the movie and accepting a new job that would make me far happier in my day-to-day and better ensure the wellbeing of my new family. I chose the latter, and the project was scrapped just three months before the shoot.
This was obviously a difficult and frustrating development. Ian encouraged me to come up with something short that we could still feasibly make in order to not waste our momentum. This film - Rad Dad - was the result. It deals with the same essential theme as the scrapped feature, which is the urgent, panicked need to prove to onseself that one is not done doing something quite yet - specifically when parenthood has upended one's life. To me, the skate trick that the protagonist obsesses over in the film is a metaphor for me making a movie at this point in my life.
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RELATED LINKS:
The film on NoBudge which includes a video intro.