Cutting Room
Project type: Fiction Short
Project status: Development
Director: Sean Jacobson
Producer: Talia Shea Levin
Writer: Dylan Skudlarek
Email: seanisaacjacobson@gmail.com
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Logline
When an unstable and obsessive filmmaker takes a job filming surgeries, he begins smuggling footage to complete his passion project, before spiraling into a darkly comedic descent into madness.
Synopsis
Through static, we land on camcorder footage of a gallbladder surgery —bile, blood, and all. Behind the camera, struggling filmmaker Frankie Faucet bolts from the room to puke. A social outcast and all-around kook, he crashes in his Aunt Doris’s attic—rent-free—as long as he helps film her backyard bird videos. When the hospital’s shady surgeons push him to record more grotesque procedures, Frankie starts smuggling footage home, stitching it into his own bird murder mystery. As the pressure mounts and his secret unravels, so does his reality, leaving him only with the clarity found in fiery collapse.

Meet the Filmmakers
Dylan Skudlarek — Writer
Dylan Skudlarek is a writer from New England based in Los Angeles. He co-wrote the short film The Perfect Pour (2023). His fiction, which explores themes of strangeness, absurdity, and horror, has appeared in The Page and ergot.
Sean Jacobson — Director
Sean Jacobson is a director and actor hailing from small town Vermont. He directed the music video for Coolhand Jax’s Everything Changes All Of The Time (2024) which was featured in Currant Jam Magazine. His short The Perfect Pour (2023) premiered at Amour Film Festival. As an assistant director He was worked with Dropout TV on their series Game Changer, D20, and Gastronauts. He is interested in stories about the intersection of mental illness, dependency, and laughs.
Talia Shea Levin — Producer
Talia Shea Levin has produced work for companies like Wolf Entertainment, Marvel,and Netflix. As a writer and director, she creates new worlds in narrative and dance films, including the viral short Make Me A Pizza (2024), which screened at SXSW, Sitges, and Clermont-Ferrand. Her work has been featured by IndieWire, Vimeo Staff Picks, Short of the Week, and NOWNESS. A Carnegie Mellon graduate in Screenwriting and Directing, she has further developed projects at residencies like the Cine Qua Non Script Revision Lab and PlayLab Film’s Amazon workshop with Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
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Contact
For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.