The Good Times

The Good Times is my first script and film created over years due to low budget and lock down. I collaborated with friends and colleagues and we shot during everyone's spare time. I couldn't be more thankful for the team who believed in this film.

The film focuses on the story of Gaz (played by Dan Thrace) who was born during the collapse of civilization and abandoned from his family trying to reconnect and understand how modern people were before the collapse. Living day to day he endures through the painful, heart breaking reality of being alone, scared only with the memories of a disturbing past that is filled with regret.

The idea came around a time when I felt deep loneliness, as well as trying to link with reality in the modern world. I began to play around with the idea of acting out this character’s life, imagining the people walking by to be fragments of my imagination. This inspired the idea to have Gaz’s own conscience to be in a fragile state, only ever seeing these imaginations of people around him when listening to music from a tape recorder he has kept with him his whole life.

I wanted to go down this direction for ‘The Good Times’ as something different than what might be expected from a post-apocalyptic film. Going down the route of dealing with his own mental health in an empty lonely world with an element of a ticking clock counting down until he snaps. By adding a modern phone (which Gaz finds and learns about) into the world, I wanted to link with our reality, how so many people feel lonely so they lock into their phones, thinking they feel real connection to those on a screen.
This psychological drama highlights mental health, loneliness, what real connection means, while also showing the audience that it is never too late to make amends with your own consciousness and subconscious in order to stay strong and carry on into the unknown. The meaning of this story for me, is no matter how disconnected we feel, in the end it is only us that can make a change and reconnect.

With the cinematography, I wanted to give that subconscious real feeling of being in the room with Gaz, with the use of framing, camera movement and placement of props that unknowingly at first foreshadow the events about to unfold, leaving the audience to deeply question the reality Gaz is in and perhaps even there own.