THOUGH COMPLETED last year, Licious is an award-winning student film which will screen at this edition of the Savannah Film Festival.
Directed by SCAD grad Amanda Bayard, Licious uses multiple narratives in its 21 minutes to tell the story of a woman’s struggle with grief. It screens Mon. Oct. 27 at 2:30 p.m. at the Lucas Theatre and Fri. Oct. 31 at 11:30 a.m. at the Trustees Theatre.
We spoke with Amanda last week.
What’s your movie about, and who or what is Licious?
Amanda Bayard: It’s mainly about a woman named Geraldine Walker. It’s basically about grief, and – I don’t want to give away too much, because it’s got sort of a Mulholland Drive thing going on, where I take you on one journey and then sort of switch over, like a car crash.
Basically she’s in these sessions with her therapist, and you get a sense that she’s not really being as truthful about it as she should be. And this fantastical world that she’s living in sort of comes to a crashing halt after her interaction with this little African American boy named Licious in the park.
This has a lot going on.
Amanda Bayard: This has a lot going on (laughs). It’s 21 minutes, and we had to cut a lot of it down. But everything that I wanted was there. In terms of colors, it’s really heavily saturated. The colors are really popping out there. My cinematographer and I really spent a lot of time going over the shotlist together. It’s nonlinear too, we’re in reality and in her fantasy world, too, so we wanted these shots to almost be like a painting.
Working on this as my thesis, every department came together so well. Obviously every film has its problems and issues, but because we were all on the same page we were able to let the movie breathe and be what it needed to be without too many problems.
The composer, who did an all-original score, brought stuff to it I never expected, that I never thought we could bring. Two of my producers, I could never have done it without them.
At 21 minutes, this is pretty long for a student film.
Amanda Bayard: They frown upon it in film school. They don’t want you to do 21 minutes. A lot of people wanted me to bring it down to 15 minutes, and I just couldn’t.
We originally had it at 25, and obviously that was too long. But going under 21 minutes we would have had to lose some major plot points. People disagreed with me about it at the time, but that’s kind of where I thought it came together as a piece, and the things I thought were important were still there.
It’s done really well so far.
Amanda Bayard: We showed it last year, and we cleaned up at the SCADemies. We won like, Best Narrative, Best Director, Best Actress, stuff like that. It was very nice.
What wouldn’t you do again?
Amanda Bayard: There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t do again. But that’s how you always feel. The first scene we shot was a huge scene outside. And my director of photography had to light the entire park. And that was very difficult on all of us. It was at night, it was freezing outside. And it would have been nice to have a little more time, but you always say that.
What are you doing these days?
Amanda Bayard: I’m in New York working for Sesame Workshop. I’m working on The Electric Company, a TV show that was on in the ‘70s, that’s coming back again. cs
