Through most of my life, I lived and breathed swimming. 5am wakeups, multiple practices a day, and at least 20 hours of training a week. The sport defined where I went to school, who my friends were, and my academic life. I was surrounded by people with the exact same mindset: a hunger to win. So when the pandemic hit and my swimming career and senior year came to an untimely end, I was thrown into a hollow reality that I’d never experienced. My life turned into unusable time that I spent laying in bed, watching horror movies, and mulling through stories and situations both real and made up. I thought about my coach who told us he would lay in bed at night with a stopwatch in hand, mentally swimming his race. I thought of myself and how I’d train my body and  my mind to endure the pain of pushing myself to go maybe even a millisecond faster. I thought about my teammate who cried to us in the locker room when she failed her class, “swimming is the only thing I am good at!” Then, I thought of Terry. Obsessive and at the top of her game with everything to lose and only herself in the way. I wanted to tell her story through the lens of horror, taking inspiration from my favorites like Black Swan and Saint Maud. That’s how the story of Lapse began.

After drafting the feature and getting my footing in the film industry, I wanted to take a sequence from the script to make the proof of concept short. This also served as a thesis film for me as I lost the opportunity to make one due to the pandemic. I went back to my university, gathered my old filmmaking classmates and swim teammates, and shot the short. It was a dream going back to where it all began and translating the thoughts in my head to a living, breathing, work of art. Now, as we come to a close in post-production, it’s time to look at the distribution of this short film to see how we can put ourselves in the best position to get opportunities to experience this story with audiences and gain funding for the feature film.