Our Last Trip
New York City, New York | Film Short
Thriller, Drama
A drifter steals his late brother's ashes and retreats to a remote lakeside cabin. But as buried memories begin bleeding into the present, he is forced to confront what really happened to his brother and whether some things refuse to stay buried.
Our Last Trip
New York City, New York | Film Short
Thriller, Drama
1 Campaigns | New York, United States
5 supporters | followers
Enter the amount you would like to pledge
$720
Goal: $10,000 for production
A drifter steals his late brother's ashes and retreats to a remote lakeside cabin. But as buried memories begin bleeding into the present, he is forced to confront what really happened to his brother and whether some things refuse to stay buried.
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Someone you LOST. Someone you LOVED. Someone you HATED. Sometimes that was all the same person. When Chester Braxton learns his estranged mother is dying, he doesn't go to her. He returns to the house he grew up in and finds his younger brother reduced to ashes, sealed in an urn. Bitter, carrying a fractured childhood, he takes the urn to the remote lakeside cabin where the family once spent summers, intending to burn the past to the ground. But the cabin remembers. The lake, the ashes, and a letter his mother left behind drag him back toward the truth about his brother's death he's spent his whole life refusing to see. Forced to confront what really happened and the darkness he may have inherited, Chester descends into a reckoning that blurs guilt, memory, and damnation.
I spent a lot of my life anxious, trying to fit into a world that hands you a set of rules and expects you to follow them. Those rules never worked for me. I was struggling with my sexuality while holding up an image of who I was supposed to be. That gets heavy. It gets dark.
Movies were my way out. For two hours, whatever was going on around me was gone. I was somewhere else entirely. And when watching wasn't enough, I started writing. Building worlds of my own. That was the first place I ever really fit.
That's also why I'm drawn to stories about people who don't fit neatly into the lives they were handed. People carrying things they didn't choose. Shame. Anger. Family. Expectations. The damage we inherit from the people and places that made us.
Our Last Trip came out of all of that. On the surface, it's a psychological thriller. Underneath, it's about the people who get shaped by where they came from and who they came from. The ones who got labeled. The ones who never quite fit. The whole film is built on one idea: ANYONE CAN FALL VICTIM TO THE ENVIRONMENT THAT SURROUNDS THEM.
That's why I want to make this film now. I've spent years writing stories and waiting for the right moment, the right resources, the right permission. At some point, you stop waiting for someone else to tell you that you're allowed to make the thing.
You make it.
Everything below happened before we shot a single frame. The script did that on its own. This short is not a condensed version of the feature. It's the PROOF OF CONCEPT we'll use to secure financing for the full-length film. The first chapter of a much larger story, and the next step toward getting the feature made.
The goal is to make a short that doesn't simply explain what the feature could be. It needs to prove it. The performances. The atmosphere. The visual language. The dread. The emotional core underneath all of it.
Once the short is finished, we'll use it to put Our Last Trip in front of audiences and the people who can help us take the next step toward the feature.
Here's the honest truth: real, dark, character-driven independent films don't get made without people who believe in them. Hollywood won't make this one. The audience has to.
We have the script. We have the team. We have the teaser. We're preparing to shoot this October.
The campaign is what gets us from preparation to production.
Our Seed&Spark greenlight goal is $10,000, with a full production budget of $40,000 to shoot Our Last Trip as a fully realized short this October: five days at a lakeside cabin in the Catskills, a lean senior crew, and the practical and post craft it takes to pull off fire, water, and a story that bends reality.
Every dollar lands on screen: cast and crew, the location, equipment, water safety, practical production needs, and the post-production work required to finish the film the way it was designed to be seen.
And $10,000 is the beginning, not the ceiling.
If we push beyond our Green Light goal, those additional funds move us closer to the full $40,000 production budget and let us protect more of what makes this film ambitious in the first place, rather than cutting it down to fit what we raised.
Everyone who contributes becomes part of this film, and you keep everything from every tier below you. Your name on the Supporter Wall. The finished film. A replica of Chester's summer-camp tee. Lucas's prayer card. The letter, sealed in an envelope marked in Kristina's trembling hand. A producer credit. A day on set in the Catskills. And for one person only, the real, screen-used hero urn, carved by hand and impossible to reproduce. The true one of one.
SCROLL DOWN TO FIND YOUR WAY IN
- Pledge. This is the engine. Every tier hands you a piece of the film, from the Supporter Wall to the one and only hero urn. Pick your tier below.
- Follow this campaign. One click at the top of the page. It costs nothing, and it isn't symbolic: on Seed & Spark, follower milestones unlock real resources for the film and count toward our Green Light.
- Send this page to one person. Not a blast. One person who'd get this film. That's how independent film actually travels: hand to hand.
The only way this gets made is if all of us show up. Together.
So let's do it. Help us tell this story. Any amount helps, and I can't wait to share it with you.
Blake Van Curen
Writer-Director
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Production & Crew
Costs $2,250
Helps secure the cinematographer, AD, and key crew who will bring this ambitious five-day shoot to life.
Cast
Costs $1,000
Goes toward fair day rates for the actors carrying this story, including the young performers playing Chester and Lucas.
Camera, Grip & Lighting
Costs $1,500
Puts the camera, lenses, and essential lighting tools in our hands to create the film's firelight, moonlight, and dread.
Locations & Travel
Costs $2,500
Helps secure our remote Catskills lakeside cabin, both our central location and production base, and gets our team and gear there.
Water Safety, Stunts & Insurance
Costs $1,500
Supports the safety diver, stunt preparation, and production insurance required to shoot our fire and underwater sequences responsibly.
Art, Wardrobe, HMU & Props
Costs $750
Builds the tactile world of the film: the hero urn, letter, prayer card, wardrobe, and the details that carry decades of history.
Craft & Contingency
Costs $500
Keeps our crew fed during five remote shoot days and gives production a small cushion for the surprises that inevitably show up uninvited.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Our Last Trip is being made by a small, passionate team that has spent years making independent films the hard way, with more craft than budget (and NEVER EVER ANY Generative AI nonsense!)
Here's who's bringing it to life.
Blake Van Curen - Writer/Director
Blake is a writer-director based in New York City. His short screenplay Our Last Trip is a Quarterfinalist at the Nashville Film Festival Screenplay Competition, a Finalist at the New York Script Awards, a Semifinalist at HollyShorts and Outstanding Screenplays, and sat on Coverfly's Red List for Thriller Shorts. He writes psychological thrillers about grief, complicity, and the family damage nobody says out loud. This short is the proof of concept for the feature, and he'd rather build it with an audience than for one.
Usher Morgan - Executive Producer
Usher is a New York-based writer-director-producer and the executive producer of Our Last Trip through Dark Passage Films. He made his directorial debut in 2015 with the dark comedy short Prego, which played the festival circuit and set the tone for the work that followed. His first feature Pickings, a collision of film noir and spaghetti western, earned a limited theatrical run through AMC Independent in 2018 and prompted the Los Angeles Times to call him "a talent to watch." He has kept building since. Plucked, co-written and co-directed with Katie Vincent, releases theatrically in 2026, and his third feature Anna's in the Woods is in post ahead of a festival run.
Edward Bally - Director of Photography
Edward is an award-winning director of photography based in Brooklyn. He began his career as an investigative journalist covering economics and politics across Europe before moving behind the camera, and that eye has carried into everything since. His nonfiction work includes features for Frontline, PBS NOVA, the BBC, ARTE, and France Télévisions, along with projects for the UN and UNICEF. His narrative work includes features such as Swing Rendez-Vous, which premiered at the La Ciotat Festival of the 1st Film and released theatrically in France, and his short Rental Husband won Best Short at both the Katra and Newark International film festivals. He is the director of photography on Our Last Trip.
Anna Carolina Bastos - Sound Recordist/Mixer
Anna Carolina Bastos is a Brooklyn-based production sound mixer, sound designer, audio engineer, and sound operator (A1). She holds a B.A. in Film Production from FACHA (Rio de Janeiro) and an MFA in Media Scoring from CUNY Brooklyn College/Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.
Kirsten Sylvester - Hair & Makeup Artist
Kirsten Sylvester is a New York based makeup artist with nearly three decades in film, television, and fashion. Her credits include The Big Sick, The Report, and Marty Supreme, and she served as key makeup artist and department head on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. She is running hair and makeup on Our Last Trip.
Jania Sanders - Production Assistant
Jania Sanders is an award-winning filmmaker originally from NYC. She wears several hats as Writer, Director, 1st Assistant Director, Cinematographer, Editor, Production Coordinator, and Assistant in the indie filmmaking, commercial, and television spaces. She has worked on: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Drew Barrymore Show, The Real Housewives Franchise, Project Runway, Below Deck, BronxNet, and with Voirlah Productions LLC, Alchemy NYC, Runway 7 for New York Fashion Week, The RealReal’s podcast Real Talk, and more.
Ethan Daniel Corbett - Chester
Ethan Daniel Corbett won Best Supporting Actor at FilmQuest 2024 for Faces. His recent festival work includes The Blue Diamond, The Alibi, and Greenbelt, and he has built a run of antagonist roles, from Wyatt L'hiver in Hulu's Voodoo to Lou Ivanov in Clown & Out, which is currently in post-production. He trained at Cal State Fullerton and Second City Chicago.
Olivia 'Liv' Hardin - Kristina
Olivia Hardin holds an MFA in Acting from the Actors Studio Drama School and studied with the Moscow Art Theater before that. Her stage roles include Inez in Sartre's No Exit, which she also co-produced to sold-out houses in New York, and Mary in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. On screen, her lead performance in Broken Toys was honored by the Best Shorts Competition, and recent work includes Rug Pull! and the series Flirt! She grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, and spent fifteen years in competitive gymnastics, which still shows up in how she uses her body on stage and on screen.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Someone you LOST. Someone you LOVED. Someone you HATED. Sometimes that was all the same person. When Chester Braxton learns his estranged mother is dying, he doesn't go to her. He returns to the house he grew up in and finds his younger brother reduced to ashes, sealed in an urn. Bitter, carrying a fractured childhood, he takes the urn to the remote lakeside cabin where the family once spent summers, intending to burn the past to the ground. But the cabin remembers. The lake, the ashes, and a letter his mother left behind drag him back toward the truth about his brother's death he's spent his whole life refusing to see. Forced to confront what really happened and the darkness he may have inherited, Chester descends into a reckoning that blurs guilt, memory, and damnation.
I spent a lot of my life anxious, trying to fit into a world that hands you a set of rules and expects you to follow them. Those rules never worked for me. I was struggling with my sexuality while holding up an image of who I was supposed to be. That gets heavy. It gets dark.
Movies were my way out. For two hours, whatever was going on around me was gone. I was somewhere else entirely. And when watching wasn't enough, I started writing. Building worlds of my own. That was the first place I ever really fit.
That's also why I'm drawn to stories about people who don't fit neatly into the lives they were handed. People carrying things they didn't choose. Shame. Anger. Family. Expectations. The damage we inherit from the people and places that made us.
Our Last Trip came out of all of that. On the surface, it's a psychological thriller. Underneath, it's about the people who get shaped by where they came from and who they came from. The ones who got labeled. The ones who never quite fit. The whole film is built on one idea: ANYONE CAN FALL VICTIM TO THE ENVIRONMENT THAT SURROUNDS THEM.
That's why I want to make this film now. I've spent years writing stories and waiting for the right moment, the right resources, the right permission. At some point, you stop waiting for someone else to tell you that you're allowed to make the thing.
You make it.
Everything below happened before we shot a single frame. The script did that on its own. This short is not a condensed version of the feature. It's the PROOF OF CONCEPT we'll use to secure financing for the full-length film. The first chapter of a much larger story, and the next step toward getting the feature made.
The goal is to make a short that doesn't simply explain what the feature could be. It needs to prove it. The performances. The atmosphere. The visual language. The dread. The emotional core underneath all of it.
Once the short is finished, we'll use it to put Our Last Trip in front of audiences and the people who can help us take the next step toward the feature.
Here's the honest truth: real, dark, character-driven independent films don't get made without people who believe in them. Hollywood won't make this one. The audience has to.
We have the script. We have the team. We have the teaser. We're preparing to shoot this October.
The campaign is what gets us from preparation to production.
Our Seed&Spark greenlight goal is $10,000, with a full production budget of $40,000 to shoot Our Last Trip as a fully realized short this October: five days at a lakeside cabin in the Catskills, a lean senior crew, and the practical and post craft it takes to pull off fire, water, and a story that bends reality.
Every dollar lands on screen: cast and crew, the location, equipment, water safety, practical production needs, and the post-production work required to finish the film the way it was designed to be seen.
And $10,000 is the beginning, not the ceiling.
If we push beyond our Green Light goal, those additional funds move us closer to the full $40,000 production budget and let us protect more of what makes this film ambitious in the first place, rather than cutting it down to fit what we raised.
Everyone who contributes becomes part of this film, and you keep everything from every tier below you. Your name on the Supporter Wall. The finished film. A replica of Chester's summer-camp tee. Lucas's prayer card. The letter, sealed in an envelope marked in Kristina's trembling hand. A producer credit. A day on set in the Catskills. And for one person only, the real, screen-used hero urn, carved by hand and impossible to reproduce. The true one of one.
SCROLL DOWN TO FIND YOUR WAY IN
- Pledge. This is the engine. Every tier hands you a piece of the film, from the Supporter Wall to the one and only hero urn. Pick your tier below.
- Follow this campaign. One click at the top of the page. It costs nothing, and it isn't symbolic: on Seed & Spark, follower milestones unlock real resources for the film and count toward our Green Light.
- Send this page to one person. Not a blast. One person who'd get this film. That's how independent film actually travels: hand to hand.
The only way this gets made is if all of us show up. Together.
So let's do it. Help us tell this story. Any amount helps, and I can't wait to share it with you.
Blake Van Curen
Writer-Director
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Production & Crew
Costs $2,250
Helps secure the cinematographer, AD, and key crew who will bring this ambitious five-day shoot to life.
Cast
Costs $1,000
Goes toward fair day rates for the actors carrying this story, including the young performers playing Chester and Lucas.
Camera, Grip & Lighting
Costs $1,500
Puts the camera, lenses, and essential lighting tools in our hands to create the film's firelight, moonlight, and dread.
Locations & Travel
Costs $2,500
Helps secure our remote Catskills lakeside cabin, both our central location and production base, and gets our team and gear there.
Water Safety, Stunts & Insurance
Costs $1,500
Supports the safety diver, stunt preparation, and production insurance required to shoot our fire and underwater sequences responsibly.
Art, Wardrobe, HMU & Props
Costs $750
Builds the tactile world of the film: the hero urn, letter, prayer card, wardrobe, and the details that carry decades of history.
Craft & Contingency
Costs $500
Keeps our crew fed during five remote shoot days and gives production a small cushion for the surprises that inevitably show up uninvited.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Our Last Trip is being made by a small, passionate team that has spent years making independent films the hard way, with more craft than budget (and NEVER EVER ANY Generative AI nonsense!)
Here's who's bringing it to life.
Blake Van Curen - Writer/Director
Blake is a writer-director based in New York City. His short screenplay Our Last Trip is a Quarterfinalist at the Nashville Film Festival Screenplay Competition, a Finalist at the New York Script Awards, a Semifinalist at HollyShorts and Outstanding Screenplays, and sat on Coverfly's Red List for Thriller Shorts. He writes psychological thrillers about grief, complicity, and the family damage nobody says out loud. This short is the proof of concept for the feature, and he'd rather build it with an audience than for one.
Usher Morgan - Executive Producer
Usher is a New York-based writer-director-producer and the executive producer of Our Last Trip through Dark Passage Films. He made his directorial debut in 2015 with the dark comedy short Prego, which played the festival circuit and set the tone for the work that followed. His first feature Pickings, a collision of film noir and spaghetti western, earned a limited theatrical run through AMC Independent in 2018 and prompted the Los Angeles Times to call him "a talent to watch." He has kept building since. Plucked, co-written and co-directed with Katie Vincent, releases theatrically in 2026, and his third feature Anna's in the Woods is in post ahead of a festival run.
Edward Bally - Director of Photography
Edward is an award-winning director of photography based in Brooklyn. He began his career as an investigative journalist covering economics and politics across Europe before moving behind the camera, and that eye has carried into everything since. His nonfiction work includes features for Frontline, PBS NOVA, the BBC, ARTE, and France Télévisions, along with projects for the UN and UNICEF. His narrative work includes features such as Swing Rendez-Vous, which premiered at the La Ciotat Festival of the 1st Film and released theatrically in France, and his short Rental Husband won Best Short at both the Katra and Newark International film festivals. He is the director of photography on Our Last Trip.
Anna Carolina Bastos - Sound Recordist/Mixer
Anna Carolina Bastos is a Brooklyn-based production sound mixer, sound designer, audio engineer, and sound operator (A1). She holds a B.A. in Film Production from FACHA (Rio de Janeiro) and an MFA in Media Scoring from CUNY Brooklyn College/Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.
Kirsten Sylvester - Hair & Makeup Artist
Kirsten Sylvester is a New York based makeup artist with nearly three decades in film, television, and fashion. Her credits include The Big Sick, The Report, and Marty Supreme, and she served as key makeup artist and department head on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. She is running hair and makeup on Our Last Trip.
Jania Sanders - Production Assistant
Jania Sanders is an award-winning filmmaker originally from NYC. She wears several hats as Writer, Director, 1st Assistant Director, Cinematographer, Editor, Production Coordinator, and Assistant in the indie filmmaking, commercial, and television spaces. She has worked on: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Drew Barrymore Show, The Real Housewives Franchise, Project Runway, Below Deck, BronxNet, and with Voirlah Productions LLC, Alchemy NYC, Runway 7 for New York Fashion Week, The RealReal’s podcast Real Talk, and more.
Ethan Daniel Corbett - Chester
Ethan Daniel Corbett won Best Supporting Actor at FilmQuest 2024 for Faces. His recent festival work includes The Blue Diamond, The Alibi, and Greenbelt, and he has built a run of antagonist roles, from Wyatt L'hiver in Hulu's Voodoo to Lou Ivanov in Clown & Out, which is currently in post-production. He trained at Cal State Fullerton and Second City Chicago.
Olivia 'Liv' Hardin - Kristina
Olivia Hardin holds an MFA in Acting from the Actors Studio Drama School and studied with the Moscow Art Theater before that. Her stage roles include Inez in Sartre's No Exit, which she also co-produced to sold-out houses in New York, and Mary in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. On screen, her lead performance in Broken Toys was honored by the Best Shorts Competition, and recent work includes Rug Pull! and the series Flirt! She grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, and spent fifteen years in competitive gymnastics, which still shows up in how she uses her body on stage and on screen.