#ShandaDidWHAT!?

#ShandaDidWHAT!?

What Is This Film?

Why This Film?

As a four-member team coming from the same film program at Governors State University, our filmmaker collective is developing this three-story film series. Each film will have a different leading protagonist, a different genre, and a different focal social message pertaining strictly to the African-American community and the urban cities in which many in this demographic reside told through a lens of current pop culture and social media trend references and major events. This film project triptych (which consists of three different stories of three starkly different genres from three different characters whose stories converge) will be centralized around a fictitious town called Noxville that is meant to resemble Chicago, IL and each story will have its own protagonist who is an inhabitant in this town. #ShandaDidWHAT!? is the short film opener to the tentative first full-length film story in the triptych (a full-length script entitled #ABFF, the hashtag acronym for #AngryBlackFemaleForever). Both this story and #ABFF are comedies following the life of the first main character Shanda and they set the tone and background story for the remaining two short films (and consequentially, the remaining two long-length films of the film series). Keela Buford developed the initial idea of this film and with the help of the rest of the team, we have since fleshed out what we believe is a strong cohesive social critique in a visual art form to educate and invigorate the masses as it relates to current public issues and events impacting not just fellow Black Americans, but also Americans as a whole in the social media age.

These such maladies include losing morals and self-respect for a piece of the ‘social media fad’ pie, the wave of information and movements caused by social media which is now being threatened by Net Neutrality, and the more insular study of racial identity that Shanda and her fellow inhabitants within this world of Noxville face in their day-to-day. Particularly, in the city of Chicago, the less-than-favorable media attention that has been placed on the city and its dwellers in the past few years has changed the faces of these dwellers into scary ones. These people are menaces to society, villains to the wider community of civility without the cloak being pulled back to see all the shades of gray that has created this present ‘villain’ in Chicago. Thus, the three main protagonists stretching across the three films in the AF.FORD Films™ triptych are all called not Noxvilleans, but ‘Noxvillains.’ Essentially, these three films are the Chicagoans’ stories told through many lenses beginning with a satirical one touching on cultural appropriation as played out in this first film (#ShandaDidWHAT!?). Then there’s a look into inner city education as is discussed in the second film. Finally, where a group of people can go from this point on with all of those things considered, faced, and surmounted is summed up in the third film.

Who are the Actors?

Special Thanks to Casting Director Zachary Bradley.