“What if an employee went over to his boss’s home for a dinner party, but during the party it’s revealed the employee is what’s for dinner?” - Kyle Harwood

With only eighteen hours to shoot, on a shoe-string budget of $200, and with only a cast and crew of five, Awkward Dinner Party is the product of nothing but utter and complete passion for the story making process.

Not wanting to wait to hear back from film school applications all winter, I reached out to a colleague in the winter of 2020/2021 seeing if he wanted to create a short film about an employee going to his supervisor’s home for a dinner party, with the twist being the boss is a cannibal intending to eat his employee by the end of the film. Zac Benson, who co-created and co-directed this piece with me added further to the twist, asking; what if the guest falls in love with his boss, misinterpreting cannibalistic puns for flirtatious advances?

We quickly got to work and created Awkward Dinner Party. This heartthrob comedy has all the charm of an indie short with the inner character conflict you’d see in the films on the big screen. We wrote the script in about three weeks, got Jonathan Nyquist to be our Director of Photography and reached out to old high school friends to play the roles of The Guest and The Boss. Ethan Magnuson and Evan Pomish knocked it out of the park taking the words from the script and embodying our ideas while contributing their own unique voices and ideas in the process.

Evan Pomish (Front) and Ethan Magnuson (Back)

Behind the Scenes