Pre-Production

This whole project spiraled out a conversation I had, which ended with a sarcastically asked "when would be a good time to die?", to which my mind conjured the phrase "5pm on a Thursday, in August".  That phrase stuck in my mind, and when I wrote a short film I attached the title to it.

The first iteration of the story was two characters driving on the road, named the Obsessive and the Fanatic.  They drove on the freeway, then chased each other onto a desert road, and finally got out of their cars and killed each other.  Then, a Scavenger carrying a unicycle walked out of the desert.  In putting his unicycle in one of the car's trunk, he would discover a body wrapped in garbage bags.  During the end credits, we would hear the Scavenger crash his stolen car into another vehicle.

I met with my friend, Nathan Gentala, and we discussed some logistics.  He suggested that filming guerrilla style on a freeway would be more difficult than it's worth, and moving the setting to the desert would be easier.  It was at this time, that I was thinking of making the short as part of an anthology, with other friends making their own shorts.  However, in the end I opted to expand the backstories of the characters into their own chapters.

I used the car chase segment as the basis for Chapter 2, expanding the backstory of the "Obsessive" character.  For another short, I had a half-baked idea for a character who would wander into the mountains and encounter a monster, which became the basis for Chapter 3.  While originally it would be some kind of monster, it changed to become the "Fanatic".  Incidentally, Nathan has his own short film about a man encountering a strange entity in a desert, called "Coven".

Chapter 4 started as an idea for desert Sirens, a play on the Greek nautical Sirens.  There would have been 3 Sirens and 1 driver, playing into a theme with each chapter's number being the amount of characters.  So ch.1 was the Scavenger, ch.2 was about 2 drivers, ch.3 had the Fanatic, Hunter, and the Devil in the Wind, ch.4 would have 3 Sirens and 1 Driver.  Following this theme, I added a character to ch.5: Cooper, who's car would be stolen by the Fanatic. This would make the body count for ch.5 include the Obsessive, the Fanatic, Cooper, the Scavenger, and the Body.  True, counting the body is a stretch.  I justified to myself by making the body a character from ch.2.  To follow this theme in the later iterations of the story, ch.4 would have the Driver, the Passenger, the Siren, and the Scavenger would drive the vehicle that they crash into.

I drew as many storyboards as I felt i could commit to, but in the end so many story details would change that I didn't end up using any of them.  I also went to Goodwill and bought some clothes to use as a dummy body that I used in some "day 0" filming with Stephen Leavitt, but it didn't end up working so the dead body remains in the trunk.  From the same Goodwill trip, I did end up using the button shirt which was worn by Hunter, then stolen by the Fanatic(changed then to the Sandman).