Featuring an Ohio University cast and crew, the short film Texting: A Love Story looks at the issues with connection in the digital age. The film is an official selection in several film festivals.
In Rani Crowe’s short film Texting: A Love Story, few words are actually spoken. Instead, audiences hear the familiar clicking of a smart phone keyboard for the majority of the eight-minute film.
Highlighting modern society’s excessive use of texting in everyday life, Texting: A Love Story looks at intimacy and connection in the digital age.
The short film is the result of part of Crowe’s thesis requirements for her Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting at Ohio University, which she acquired in 2014. Crowe is now the assistant director of the School of Dance, Film and Theater.
Crowe described her short film as “funny, heartbreaking and unfortunately true” as she examined the way today’s society uses technology as a “surrogate for connection.”
“It’s very much about how people struggle to communicate in person but how we can say almost anything over text,” said Lisa Bol, a third-year graduate actor who stars as the nameless woman at the center of the film. “Because saying it through text message, you’re safe in a sense. You can’t get as hurt. You’re not as vulnerable because the phone is there to protect you.”
Texting: A Love Story is also garnering a lot of attention from film festivals worldwide. The short film was already screened at this year’s College Town Film Festival at Penn State University and is an official selection at the Toronto Short Film Festival, the Sanford International Film Festival and, most recently, the Athens International Film and Video Festival.
The film’s director, former OU assistant professor of film Jeanette Buck, said its popularity is due to the way people are relating to the script.
“Rani wrote a script people can connect to and laugh at,” Buck said. “It’s getting attention because many people of a certain age are seeing something of themselves reflected on the screen and that’s what we love about movies. There’s something up there that we identify with and is speaking to us about our lives.”
Texting was filmed in January 2014 in Bol’s home, in an Alden Library office and in a bathroom in Baker University Center.
The final scene features an “extended sex scene” similar to the one between Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm in Bridesmaids.
“The only time they talk during that scene is through text message,” Bol said. “We’re making absurd noises. It’s like two Muppets going at it.”
Though Buck said that scene was fun to direct, especially as she sat on the bed with her half-naked actors, she said her main objective in directing her first comedy was to keep those comedic moments honest instead of just being times to laugh at something.
A trailer is available on Vimeo. However the full nearly eight-minute film is not available because Crowe said some of the festivals want to have premiere status for the film.
Crowe said she submitted the film to about 100 festivals and is excited to hear the results throughout the rest of 2015, as the festivals take place all year long.
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