Many people question the meaning of life. Why are we here? What are we supposed to do? For C.H. Aron, the answer is simple: his job. It’s what he is and what he does. But what happens when that meaning is taken away? What happens when the world ceases to have a place for someone like Aron? Does it all end with a whimper? Or can a new life with new meaning take its place? The answer to these questions are not simple but they can be explored through the power of storytelling. Storytelling, especially in film, is a tool with many active parts designed to relay a message to the audience. Dialogue, sound, music, editing, and visuals; everything must come together to create a coherent, cinematic experience.
The Morning Star was originally meant to be a spoof on the film noir genre; something that was short, simple, and easy to do in a weekend. And after a few
weeks of brainstorming, Christopher J. Otis, my writer, came up to me and gave me exactly that. However, there was a problem. It just wasn’t working so I asked him to take a different approach to the film. Less spoof and more serious. I told him not to try and fit it into any particular genre. Just let the ideas flow. Fortunately, Chris already had a whole army of ideas just waiting to be thrown into the blender and after he came back with the rewrite I was presented with a beast of a totally different color. The script was complex and at first a little bit weird but the only word afterwards I could bring myself to say was “outstanding”. From that point on I knew this was a movie I had to do; that this was a story I had to tell.
STORY – C.H. Aron, a gun for hire on his last job, and his partner Mara search for the depressed and murderous Leander Lomax, a young man whose past actions require the duo to end his life and ferry his soul from this world to the next. But, what at first seems like an everyday assignment to Aron soon turns out to be more than even he can handle as Leander’s actions reveal a part of the world that no one thought possible. The Morning Star finds its center surrounding the tale of these three characters, each one inspired from various cultural myths and legends, each one facing the end of the world in their own way.
VISUALS – After reading the script and doing my research, I came up with ideas to make the story connect visually with the emotions I wanted everyone else to feel. I wanted every single shot and lighting technique to convey a different message throughout the story. Color, framing, and shot size plays just as important a role as the dialogue spoken by each character.
EDITING – The editing plays out slowly in the beginning but as the journey of Aron and the other characters intensifies, so too does the way I cut the film.
MUSIC – In the world of “The Morning Star”, there are only three characters. To convey that idea, William Archiello (the composer) and I came up with the idea of having only three instruments play throughout the entire film, one for each character, each instrument telling their character’s story in their own unique way.
All in all, behind the technical aspects of “The Morning Star”, this film is essentially about finding the single most important thing we hold closest to our hearts and battling the fear of loosing it for good. It’s about realizing that even within that worse-case-scenario, a new day will always rise brimming with new possibilities.
Screening at 
