“‘Schlimmer’ is one of those pieces about which my thoughts go from gushing praise to unrelenting criticism, depending on my mood. There was so much that went right with it, but also innumerable little problems along the way. In the interests of focusing on the positive, I will say that in terms of a learning and growing experience, we really couldn’t have asked for anything more. We put together a killer team, and really corrected some of the flatness-of-character issues that plagued ‘Loose Ends.’ Still, our lack of an organized writing process left us with an overdependence on manufactured conflict rather than truly advancing the plot via valuable character interaction. Editing wholly improvised dialogue into a consistent narrative proved far more complicated than I’d anticipated, but the immediacy of the delivery left me confident in the decision to work from an outline rather than a detailed script. I think the greatest takeaway from the experience was the realization that the mad-scramble weekend model was not only a viable way of producing a short, but actually a desirable one. With the demands of daily life as extensive as they are, it’s practically impossible to set aside much longer to work on something like this. Perhaps it’s a symptom of our instant-gratification culture, but when the alternative is the all-too-common practice of allowing a project to remain indefinitiely at the almost-but-not-quite-finished stage, it’s truly rewarding to be able to actually complete something.”