Lemon Season
Los Angeles, California | Film Short
Comedy, Drama
Faced with a move that will sever their friendship, three girls in rural California hatch a desperate plan to sabotage a train. Lemon Season is a gritty, sun-bleached look at the friction of girlhood and the lengths we go to for the people we call "home." Support the sabotage here!
Lemon Season
Los Angeles, California | Film Short
Comedy, Drama
1 Campaigns | California, United States
8 supporters | followers
Enter the amount you would like to pledge
$465
Goal: $4,000 for production
Faced with a move that will sever their friendship, three girls in rural California hatch a desperate plan to sabotage a train. Lemon Season is a gritty, sun-bleached look at the friction of girlhood and the lengths we go to for the people we call "home." Support the sabotage here!
Participating In
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Being 13 sucks. It is objectively humiliating in every way. And yet it's also the age when your friendships feel indestructible, and the future seems like a distant dream...
Lemon Season is a short film about three thirteen-year-old girls in rural California who spend one afternoon trying to stop a train. The train will carry Devon away from her best friends, her bedroom full of polaroids, and the clubhouse they've built into their entire world. It cannot be stopped. They try — anyway — with a mannequin, a scrap pile, and the particular ferocity of girls who still believe that if they push hard enough, things will stay where they put them.
Why This Film?
Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was not what you'd call cool. I had about three friends total, and one of them was my sister, Noelle. But our summers together still exist as the most free and sentimental times of my life. Those friendships changed or disappeared over time. I think they helped make me who I am.
The Writers and Their One Other Friend (2010)
That's what this film is. I wanted to make a movie about the tender, disgusting, and honest moments that exist between girls who are straddling childhood and adulthood. The ones you don't see onscreen very often. So many female coming-of-age stories are really about the boys at the center of them. That was not my experience as a thirteen-year-old. My experience involved peeing in buckets in a clubhouse in the boiling heat, rolling around in the dirt, and trying to build bridges across ditches. Those friendships were so meaningful. And like everything, they changed.
As a thirteen-year-old girl, change is the greatest adversary. That's what our protagonist Devon is dealing with: her changing body, her changing home, and her changing friendships. She's fighting all of it at once. And the train that's coming for her? She's going to try to stop it.
Lemon Season is the film I needed to see when I was her age. We're making it now. By supporting this project, you are helping us bring an authentic, unsanitized version of girlhood to the screen.
The Visual World
We're shooting against the California summer like it's something to survive — sun-bleached, gritty, tactile. The film's palette draws from deep indigo, burnt terracotta, and mossy green set against the charcoal iron of the train tracks. Each character has her own color thread. It's a period piece set in 2010, which means props and production design are doing heavy lifting to make the world feel lived-in. Our aesthetic touchstones are Little Miss Sunshine and Eighth Grade: grounded, intentional, and deeply honest about what it costs to be this age.
Where Your Support Goes
Lemon Season is being produced through the MFA in Film and Television Production program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts.
We're currently in production with young actors who deserve a fully resourced set. What we're raising for is specific: safety personnel the railroad requires, a studio teacher for our minor cast, and the production design and camera equipment that makes 2010 feel more like a memory than a costume.
Making a film with child actors in the rugged landscapes of Los Angeles requires more than just a camera. Your contributions will directly fund:
- The Safety Team: Ensuring our cast and crew are safe while filming near tracks and in remote locations.
- Our Studio Teacher: Supporting the education and welfare of our young leads on set.
- Production Design & Camera Equipment: Executing the specific visual language that we've established for this film.
We chose Seed&Spark because we're not asking for charity. We're building an audience for a film that deserves one. The people who support independent film here understand that a thirteen-year-old girl peeing in a bucket in a heatwave isn't a punchline. It's a portrait.
When You'll See the Film & The Road Ahead
We are on track to have a locked, finished film by September. From there, Lemon Season enters the festival circuit. We are targeting over thirty festivals, ranging from incredible SoCal indie fests right in our backyard to the big leagues in Boulder, Colorado — the new home of Sundance, and the hometown of our writers and director!
The Stretch Goal
Hitting our goal means we can make the film. Surpassing it means we can make it shine. Any funding raised beyond 100% goes straight onto the screen: elevating our post-production process and color grading, and giving us the runway to submit to an even wider array of film festivals.
How to Help
Please, donate! Any amount helps us reach our goal!
Follow the project here, and on Instagram. @lemonseasonmovie
And please, tell someone who remembers being thirteen and knowing, with complete certainty, that their summer would last forever! It didn't. But we can put it on film. Thank you!
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Arri Alexa Mini
Costs $2,000
This camera will help us establish the golden and realistic atmosphere we are trying to establish in this story.
The Train Tracks
Costs $2,000
Shooting at train tracks is not cheap, and neither are the safety protocols. The train carries a lot of this story.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Samantha Videon
Director / Co-Writer
Sam is a filmmaker born and raised in Boulder, Colorado. She's drawn to stories that don't glamorize. She believes life isn't always pretty, and that some of the greatest beauty lives in the ugly, overlooked corners most people walk past. Growing up, Sam wore the same sweatshirt every single day through all three years of middle school. This didn't make making friends easy, but the ones she did have made her summers magical. Sam is pursuing her M.F.A. in Film and Television Production at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, where she has built her craft across a range of short films. This project, which she wrote with her sister Noelle about their teenage summers, is her most ambitious to date — and the most personal.
Noelle Videon
Co-Writer
Noelle Videon holds an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. As Sam's sister, she has had the opportunity to explore the world of cinema and its vast range of storytelling forms. Drawing from real-world inspiration to create original stories offers a compelling counterpoint to her journalistic training. Pursuing this creative journey alongside her sister has been especially rewarding.
Minh Tran
Producer
Minh is a Vietnamese-American producer-director who focuses on memory, loneliness, and the brittle ties that bind families together. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Film & Television Production at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where mentors, including Robert Yeoman, ASC, and Producer Susan Arnold, P.G.A, have praised his directing and adaptive filmmaking abilities. Minh’s films often depict characters who cannot return to what they’ve lost, only move forward — a cinematic expression of his own belief that stories heal when they confront the truth. He aims to create films with emotional rewatch value and to build a career marked by discipline, resilience, and intentional storytelling.
Jonathan (Wiggy) Wigdortz
Producer
Wiggy adores stories about mythology, heavy metal, and growing up. He's a recent MFA graduate of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, with production credits that include the USC First Look-nominated DIRTY FUZZ, as well as NBC's THE VOICE. He's also worked with other clients, including 20th Century Fox,
Bleecker Street Films, and Orion Pictures. Website.
Betsy Shi
Producer
Betsy is a Chinese producer with hands-on experience in budget management, scheduling, and production coordination. She holds an MS degree in Applied Communication Research from USC Annenberg and a BS degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Michigan. She is passionate about using her voice and vision to represent her culture and values through storytelling.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Being 13 sucks. It is objectively humiliating in every way. And yet it's also the age when your friendships feel indestructible, and the future seems like a distant dream...
Lemon Season is a short film about three thirteen-year-old girls in rural California who spend one afternoon trying to stop a train. The train will carry Devon away from her best friends, her bedroom full of polaroids, and the clubhouse they've built into their entire world. It cannot be stopped. They try — anyway — with a mannequin, a scrap pile, and the particular ferocity of girls who still believe that if they push hard enough, things will stay where they put them.
Why This Film?
Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was not what you'd call cool. I had about three friends total, and one of them was my sister, Noelle. But our summers together still exist as the most free and sentimental times of my life. Those friendships changed or disappeared over time. I think they helped make me who I am.
The Writers and Their One Other Friend (2010)
That's what this film is. I wanted to make a movie about the tender, disgusting, and honest moments that exist between girls who are straddling childhood and adulthood. The ones you don't see onscreen very often. So many female coming-of-age stories are really about the boys at the center of them. That was not my experience as a thirteen-year-old. My experience involved peeing in buckets in a clubhouse in the boiling heat, rolling around in the dirt, and trying to build bridges across ditches. Those friendships were so meaningful. And like everything, they changed.
As a thirteen-year-old girl, change is the greatest adversary. That's what our protagonist Devon is dealing with: her changing body, her changing home, and her changing friendships. She's fighting all of it at once. And the train that's coming for her? She's going to try to stop it.
Lemon Season is the film I needed to see when I was her age. We're making it now. By supporting this project, you are helping us bring an authentic, unsanitized version of girlhood to the screen.
The Visual World
We're shooting against the California summer like it's something to survive — sun-bleached, gritty, tactile. The film's palette draws from deep indigo, burnt terracotta, and mossy green set against the charcoal iron of the train tracks. Each character has her own color thread. It's a period piece set in 2010, which means props and production design are doing heavy lifting to make the world feel lived-in. Our aesthetic touchstones are Little Miss Sunshine and Eighth Grade: grounded, intentional, and deeply honest about what it costs to be this age.
Where Your Support Goes
Lemon Season is being produced through the MFA in Film and Television Production program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts.
We're currently in production with young actors who deserve a fully resourced set. What we're raising for is specific: safety personnel the railroad requires, a studio teacher for our minor cast, and the production design and camera equipment that makes 2010 feel more like a memory than a costume.
Making a film with child actors in the rugged landscapes of Los Angeles requires more than just a camera. Your contributions will directly fund:
- The Safety Team: Ensuring our cast and crew are safe while filming near tracks and in remote locations.
- Our Studio Teacher: Supporting the education and welfare of our young leads on set.
- Production Design & Camera Equipment: Executing the specific visual language that we've established for this film.
We chose Seed&Spark because we're not asking for charity. We're building an audience for a film that deserves one. The people who support independent film here understand that a thirteen-year-old girl peeing in a bucket in a heatwave isn't a punchline. It's a portrait.
When You'll See the Film & The Road Ahead
We are on track to have a locked, finished film by September. From there, Lemon Season enters the festival circuit. We are targeting over thirty festivals, ranging from incredible SoCal indie fests right in our backyard to the big leagues in Boulder, Colorado — the new home of Sundance, and the hometown of our writers and director!
The Stretch Goal
Hitting our goal means we can make the film. Surpassing it means we can make it shine. Any funding raised beyond 100% goes straight onto the screen: elevating our post-production process and color grading, and giving us the runway to submit to an even wider array of film festivals.
How to Help
Please, donate! Any amount helps us reach our goal!
Follow the project here, and on Instagram. @lemonseasonmovie
And please, tell someone who remembers being thirteen and knowing, with complete certainty, that their summer would last forever! It didn't. But we can put it on film. Thank you!
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Arri Alexa Mini
Costs $2,000
This camera will help us establish the golden and realistic atmosphere we are trying to establish in this story.
The Train Tracks
Costs $2,000
Shooting at train tracks is not cheap, and neither are the safety protocols. The train carries a lot of this story.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Samantha Videon
Director / Co-Writer
Sam is a filmmaker born and raised in Boulder, Colorado. She's drawn to stories that don't glamorize. She believes life isn't always pretty, and that some of the greatest beauty lives in the ugly, overlooked corners most people walk past. Growing up, Sam wore the same sweatshirt every single day through all three years of middle school. This didn't make making friends easy, but the ones she did have made her summers magical. Sam is pursuing her M.F.A. in Film and Television Production at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, where she has built her craft across a range of short films. This project, which she wrote with her sister Noelle about their teenage summers, is her most ambitious to date — and the most personal.
Noelle Videon
Co-Writer
Noelle Videon holds an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. As Sam's sister, she has had the opportunity to explore the world of cinema and its vast range of storytelling forms. Drawing from real-world inspiration to create original stories offers a compelling counterpoint to her journalistic training. Pursuing this creative journey alongside her sister has been especially rewarding.
Minh Tran
Producer
Minh is a Vietnamese-American producer-director who focuses on memory, loneliness, and the brittle ties that bind families together. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Film & Television Production at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where mentors, including Robert Yeoman, ASC, and Producer Susan Arnold, P.G.A, have praised his directing and adaptive filmmaking abilities. Minh’s films often depict characters who cannot return to what they’ve lost, only move forward — a cinematic expression of his own belief that stories heal when they confront the truth. He aims to create films with emotional rewatch value and to build a career marked by discipline, resilience, and intentional storytelling.
Jonathan (Wiggy) Wigdortz
Producer
Wiggy adores stories about mythology, heavy metal, and growing up. He's a recent MFA graduate of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, with production credits that include the USC First Look-nominated DIRTY FUZZ, as well as NBC's THE VOICE. He's also worked with other clients, including 20th Century Fox,
Bleecker Street Films, and Orion Pictures. Website.
Betsy Shi
Producer
Betsy is a Chinese producer with hands-on experience in budget management, scheduling, and production coordination. She holds an MS degree in Applied Communication Research from USC Annenberg and a BS degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Michigan. She is passionate about using her voice and vision to represent her culture and values through storytelling.