AMERICAN FLOOD: THE FILM

BELIEF SYSTEMS and SELF-LIBERATION

Almost as large as the primary four characters... are their belief systems. No one can escape themselves. This project uses baseball - a notoriously "heady" sport - as a microcosm of how, in real life, our mental landscape sculpts our external reality.

AUTHENTIC vs. PERFORMED SELF, IDENTITY & GRAND SCHEMAS

One of the central questions is how we come to the conclusions about who we are- and how fragile (and often unhelpful) those stories are. The story builds an entire ecosystem on a single offhanded lie- but maybe it was meant to be exactly how it turned out.

CYCLICAL TENSION & RELEASE

The plot structure follows this pattern:

[ EXTERNAL ] [ INTERNAL ] [ NEW ] [ ] [ ] -> [ ] -> [ EXTERNAL ] -> [ ... ] [ PRESSURE ] [ SHIFT ] [ PRESSURE ] [ ]

The story is structured this way, from its smallest moments to its peaks, as a web of internal frameworks building and changing the world around them.

FATHER/SON DYNAMICS, GENERATIONAL PATTERNS & VICARIOUS ACHIEVEMENT

This piece is a father/son story. It uses two father/son dynamics as contrasting frameworks for manhood, American individualism, and ethos as a subject of one's worldview. How two fathers can want the same thing for their boy, but both are also stuck in their own learned patterns - patterns that now live and breathe through their sons.

BASEBALL AS A METAPHOR

A more passive, but still present, operator, is the usage of baseball itself. Representing boyhood, America, and meritocracy, baseball is the backdrop of this piece.