Uncovering The Truth of ‘Obsolescence’

ScifiPulse will be at Gen Con in Indianapolis this year and one of the movies playing at the Gen Con 2011 film festival is the scifi thriller Obsolescence. This short film by Indiana filmmaker Jakob Bilinski (Foxxy Madonna vs the Black Death, Shade of Grey) has been getting lots of positive buzz. The film has some big surprises, so I’ve tried to tread carefully while chatting with Bilinski about the film.

“Obsolescence is a scifi thriller that tells the story of Nick, a man that has recently lost his wife. He is unable to get over her passing and becomes obsessed with this notion that there is this conspiracy… that there is more behind her passing than what seems on the surface,” described Bilinski. “He starts this violent obsessive journey to uncover the truth. There is sort of a blurred line if it is all in his head or is there something more. He uncovers something far worse than he anticipated.”

Bilinski has always been interested in telling stories through a visual medium.

“I was definitely that kid that that always would try to find my own way to make my own version of a project in class. I remember there was an English class I had and we had to make a project on something we had studied that year. I was kind of obsessed with Shakespeare at the time. So I decided I was going to make a short film adaptation of Hamlet, but with me and friends with guns instead of swords… this was pre-Columbine,” said Bilinski. “I made this sort of like wannabe-Tarantino shotgun action version of Hamlet in 15 minutes. It was absolutely terrible, but I remember it got this standing ovation. I realized even though I worked ten times harder on it, it was fun. That kind of stuck with me and I made more short films in college. It dawned on me one day I had to be a filmmaker.”

After his “film school” training making short films with friends, he started making more professional films starting with the short film Mime, then the 48-hour short Foxxy Madonna vs the Black Death, the feature film Shade of Grey and music videos.

Obsolescence, his most recent production, was born while he was dating his future wife, Mackenzie. She told Bilinski about one of her classes at the University of Southern Indiana that was covering the concept of Obsolescence, the idea that a manufacturer will put something in an item so that it will fail after a predetermined amount of time.

The basic idea struck a cord with Bilinski, spurring him to write a feature called Planned Obsolescence.

“It’s actually a pretty intricate scifi thriller. I wrote on it and then shelved it, because I didn’t have the budget to make it. Shade of Grey was hitting festivals and I was going out to LA to stay for a week while the film played at a festival there. I was crashing with Scott [Ganyo]. We had worked on Foxxy Madonna vs the Black Death and Shade of Grey. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, but we agreed to make something while I was out there. We had no idea what. A little before I went out there we were bringing up ideas and I brought up the concept of Obsolescence. We both thought that was really cool, said Bilinski. “Scott is real into scifi and we knew we wanted something in the thriller genre. Character based.. kind of a character drama, but we smuggle in the [scifi] genre elements. We decided to spin something off that concept. I was writing scenes while in the airplane terminal on the way to LA. When I got there, we started writing the next day. We were writing for two days.”

Ganyo and Bilinski contacted people they knew to see if they wanted to be in the short film.

“It was like… Here is the script and we are going to roll in 20 minutes,” chuckled Bilinski. “It was very much constructed like a 48 hour shoot. Since I was shooting, directing it, and editing, I knew the pieces I needed. It was a little strenuous because there were times when I was holding the boom mic while shooting and directing it.”

It is a well filmed short film that I was surprised to learn was shot on standard definition, but could easily fool you into thinking it was HD or film. Of course, the beautiful LA backdrop doesn’t hurt. And although the cast (Scott Ganyo, Lucas Ellis, Jen Lilley, Rosalind Rubin) had little time to prepare, you wouldn’t know it because they deliver impressive performances.

Bilinski and Ganyo have plans for possibly more Obsolescence, either as a web series or movie. Time will tell if this short film will fall victim to the concept of obsolescence or will live on far longer with more stories in this dramatic world.

Obsolescence screens at the Gen Con Indy Film Festival at 6:30 pm on Saturday, August 6^th. Bilinski will also be on the Scriptwriting Panel at 3 pm that day.

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Marx H. Pyle is a writer, martial artist and independent filmmaker. A graduate of Vancouver Film School, he has worked on a number of projects including the short film he wrote and directed, Silence of the Belle. He is currently in post-production of his scifi web series Reality On Demand.