Behind the Scenes

Created for Daryl Della’s class at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Transit Trouble starts with a familiar student-film setup: two strangers waiting for public transportation.

Lorenzo Ocon plays an oddball who takes an increasingly uncomfortable interest in the comic book Nate is reading. The encounter keeps escalating until Lorenzo finally drives him away with a disgusting bit of improvised behavior involving what appears to be feces. In reality, the offending substance was a half-melted Snickers bar rolled around in dirt.

The idea came from a story Brandon J. Snyder had told about an actual San Francisco bus ride, where he encountered a man smearing feces on himself and laughing. Snyder was not involved in the shoot, but Daryl credited him as a writer for providing the incident that inspired the film.

That credit became a small point of contention. Nate felt that his own contribution to the finished short deserved more recognition, an early example of the surprisingly complicated authorship questions that could emerge from films built as much from shared stories and improvisation as from formal scripts.

Daryl was uncertain how the material would play in class. The movie was deliberately crude, strange, and far removed from the safer student-film exercises being made around it. Instead, the response was enthusiastic, reinforcing Daryl’s growing instinct that committing fully to an unusual idea was usually more interesting than sanding it down for approval.

The film’s presentation also changed during the class critique process. An instructor suggested removing the conventional opening credits from an early cut, so Daryl replaced them with an illustrated title card inspired by Looney Tunes, The Three Stooges, and other classic theatrical shorts. The solution fit the movie much better and gave the brief opening credits a reason to exist stylistically.

Transit Trouble remains a very small film built around one extremely unpleasant joke, but it also reinforced a lesson Daryl would keep learning over and over: committing fully to the strange idea was always better than sanding it down into something safer. The crude joke wasn’t what made the film work. The confidence was. Boldness always wins.