Ready to Go

A quarrelsome high school-aged brother and sister get ready to go to school one morning. For each one, in their own way, it's an ordinary day.

  • Martina Reese
    Director
  • Martina Reese
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Drama, comedy
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 31, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    1,200 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Martina Reese

At the midpoint of a satisfying career in graphic design, Martina Reese met filmmaking and fell in love--which derailed pretty much everything. And so, the one-time designer and soccer-mom emerged as a guerrilla filmmaker. Since her 2010 debut shorts "Vicky Gets Dressed" and "One Boy" (starring her children and their friends), Ms. Reese has steadily expanded her body of work and fluency in the medium with sleeper hit shorts such as "The Swimmer" (2012); "Bathroom" (2016), "Move," "Pity," and "Trigger Point" (2017); and "Big Break," "Slow Me Down," and "Twins" (2018). Three new additions to the Reese catalog, "Floating Man," "The Librarians," and "Burn," were released in 2019. A super-busy summer of 2019 yielded a long-short anthology, titled "Four Short Films About America," composed of "The Jacksons," "First Date," "Ready To Go," and "Lucky."
Reese's first foray into feature-length filmmaking, "Exile," was cast in Spring 2020 and was scheduled to begin shooting in June. While the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, the production is on hold. In the meantime, please visit the Exile Facebook page @Exilemovie2020 to meet the stellar cast and production team that will bring the film to life when circumstances allow.
Propelling micro-budget productions to completion has allowed (um, forced) Ms. Reese to acquire skills in many aspects of the process: writing, casting, location scouting, directing, camera operation, lighting, field audio, editing, ADR and, most importantly, catering. Having created a credible body of work, she is excited to move toward working with skilled collaborators who share her outsize passion for creating independent drama and comedy.

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Director Statement

I discovered filmmaking the digital age, around 2010, which made it possible for me to learn by small-scale experimentation. In the years since, I have been exploring many aspects of the craft without being stopped by the financial or structural barriers that would likely have been insurmountable for me during the pre-digital film era.
Trained as a graphic designer but only partly fulfilled by my years of employment as a designer, film creation has been a breakthrough for me. It woke me up from a feeling of going through the motions. I love filmmaking because it is hard but not impossible. I love filmmaking because so much is out of my control, yet planning and organization are indispensable. I love it because it involves so much disappointment, yet there seems to always be a way to channel failure into growth. I love it because it is synthetic. I have never been comfortable in a narrow discipline and film brings everything together. Everything.
Filmmaking is both technical and aesthetic, visual and aural, literal and metaphorical, collaborative and solitary, organizational and intuitive. It changes the way I inhabit the world; I find myself paying more attention to places, faces, witnessed phenomena, chance encounters, overheard conversational fragments, light, sound, music, literature. And, of course, creating in the film medium changes the way I watch film. To me, at best, films are groping and imperfect attempts to express something elusive and ambiguous. I am drawn to films that find beauty in the ordinary, the un-beautiful. I relate to stories that don't have a tidy resolution.
If film stories are a study of the interplay between the isolated and the socially interconnected self, the act of filmmaking depends on the same interplay. For me, the germ of an idea becomes conscious, then changes as it becomes external, affected by interaction with others in ways that are as unpredictable as the weather. I love the solitary periods of research, writing, and editing. I love the collaboration that happens during filming, particularly since my unpaid and underpaid nonprofessional collaborators bring surprising willingness, generosity, and curiosity.

FAN COMMENT

Martina Reese brings an intriguing and subtle sense of mystery to each project. She gives her audience the benefit of the doubt, assuming they are intelligent beings who can rise to the challenge of understanding tacit clues. This ineffable quality makes every one of her films a rich viewing experience that lingers. --Hilary R.