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The action comedy gangster tragedy of how one bag of money ended the lives of seven equally incompetent misanthropes. Murphy's law with fists, guns and drug money.

Rip N' Run is the iconic DSME short film by Michael Delisle. The first of the seminal "Big Three Shorts" from the studio. And the first after founder and co-director Dulvlu Spa graduated from film school. For DSME... everything can be dated to either pre Rip N' Run or post Rip N' Run.


This is a movie about things going wrong.
Not just in the story, but in real life. Rip N' Run is a unique experience because as many things went wrong in the real life making of it as went wrong for the characters on screen.
Two friends get inside information on an upcoming cartel-sponsored money handoff of $100,000 near their small town, USA place of residential monotony.
They make a quarter of that in a year mopping kitchen floors, but they can kickass.
So, their plan is a no-brainer.
Rip the money from the gangsters and Run away with it.
Hopefully under the auspice of force. A simple plan until two hitmen get involved. You think you know the rest, but the movie throws this all out the window by means only a true indie film can muster.


At first, the flick feels like every indie short film in a nutshell. The setting, characters and dialog trace their DNA to the New Hollywood crime movies that every young male director bases their personality on from ages 15 to 25. There's hitmen challenging authority, absurdly colorful montages of criminal activity, scene transitions out of a fever dream and every excessive stylistic flair you could slap on a movie for under $10,000 -- half of which was spent on the used camera that shot it. And $0 on the personnel, which reads like a yearbook at a school for podcasting. Oh, and don't forget the alarm clocks, trunk shots and lengthy one-takes. The credits have the same names in seven places. The sound is characteristically dodgy. The casting as diverse as the ecosystem of the north pole. The fruits of all this... serendipitously succulent.
Thankfully, the creators knew the score and held no pretenses. The main characters weren't even named, and twenty minutes of fluff was cut out. Entire scenes in the script were put onto page simply as "they fight". Our little project was meant to be shot in 2 weeks for a release 3 months out. Rip N' Run was destined to be another capstone project of a film school grad and a high school dropout. Until it wasn't.
This is the movie that ended Devon McDonald and forged Dulvlu Spa in flame. DSME tried to make Pulp Fiction-meets-Rush Hour on $5K while the director was unemployed, and the producer was going through a nasty divorce at the weary age of 23. Working on a movie like that makes you realize if you actually wanted to be a filmmaker in the first place. The lead actors would depart the project with a third of it left to film. I defaulted on loans, lost every friend not working on this picture (and even some in it), and had multiple cars die. This 40 minute movie needed 33 days of shooting. A dozen film student grads retired from filmmaking before the final cut was made; Because Rip N' Run was the REAL film school. And real film school teaches you that you're not going to make it. Not in the way you think. Turns out, that way was better.
Nothing will ever be as difficult to make as Rip N' Run. It was a wholly standard movie in theory, that would then in practice demand everything to be made. All things in flesh in mind were put at stake for Delisle and I. Consequently, the movie took a piece of our soul to exist. Then... it became something else. It's not just the aggregate of every short film by way of its myriad of tropes. It's got the heart and hardship in it that lies at the core of every passion project. The bonds made through it are lifelong. The lessons learned made a man out of those that stuck it to the end. The movie isn't great, but I'm sad that no matter how much better I become... I'll never make another like it.
The movie would then take 6 years to actually finish. I had to learn a hundred editing tricks just to cobble it together. Every mistake that could be made, I made on this film. Replaying that on a lonely computer in between 12 hour shifts for years would send me into such a spell of anxiety that I'd repeatedly leave the project to make other, smaller films. And that's how 10 movies got made. The assets, skills, revelations and relationships picked up from Rip N' Run are the sole reason anything shot in 2019 to 2023 was possible. And now as I write this in the last day of 2024... I'm happy to put it in the past. The work needed to be done, now it's time to do better. Because from everything Rip N' Run made me realize... the utmost epiphany was that - for better or worse - I'm a filmmaker above all else.



















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