Choosing a title for my Reach Film Fellowship short was a struggle.

The story follows two brothers as they navigate a newly complex relationship over the course of one afternoon, so naturally my first working title was Brothers. It worked fine and stated something simple and factual about the story, so it stuck. I had purchased a URL, set up a website, and begun initial promotion for the project – increasing my commitment to Brothers.

As I got into production and post and my film materialized, however, I realized I needed a new title. Brothers doesn’t evoke enough visually or emotionally in a potential viewer’s mind. Furthermore, anyone who searched for “Brothers the film” online would have to dig through dozens of results related to the recently released Jake Gyllenhaal/Toby McGuire movie of the same title to find anything about my project. A quick IMDb search immediately revealed that my film would be one of many, many films called Brothers.

So I set out to find a more evocative and unique title. My first strategy was just to think about it and wait for inspiration to strike. A week later I didn’t have any good ideas, so I decided to take a more structured approach. I made lists of possible titles, asked my cast and crew for ideas, and I re-read the script looking for moments or lines of dialogue that could yield a new name. This gave me many options, but nothing that really fit.

Finally, I sat down to discuss title options with Reva Goldberg and Margaret Shafer, who run the Reach Film Fellowship at Cinereach. As we debated various ideas, for the first time I was forced to articulate what I wanted from the title. It had to be unique, evocative, and it was also important to me that it reflect the essence of my film in a meaningful way. A baseball bat is an important object in the film, but The Bat was too literal and too plain. There’s an important scene that takes place in the dining room, but My Chair at the Table felt too forced. The Hideaway appealed to me as an option that eluded to both the boys’ emerging identity and to childhood games, but Reva pointed out that it has connotations that don’t fit the film, (“It makes me think of pirates,” is how she put it).

Ultimately, Reva suggested The Drawing and when she said it, I knew that was the title. A young boy’s drawing figures very significantly into my coming-of-age story. It felt simple and solid. It evoked a key scene and symbol without giving anything away, but also hinted at the process of self-creation, of growing up.

A scene from Gabriel Long's "The Drawing" (formerly "Brothers")

You might conclude that the lesson here is to get other people to title your film, but that’s not quite it. In order to recognize The Drawing as the right choice, I had to develop a clear idea of what I wanted it to do. Without that knowledge, I was stabbing in the dark to come up with ideas and judge suggestions from others. Only when I knew how I wanted the title to look, sound, and feel could I select it.

RFF 2010 Fellow Gabriel Long (mentored by Laurie Collyer) has done extensive work in both narrative and documentary film. Two of his documentary projects were nationally broadcast by Current TV. Swimming New York City documents a swimming race around Governor’s Island, and The Art of Sticks offers a portrait of outdoor sculptor Patrick Doherty. He has also completed seven narrative short films, most recently Adán, which follows a schoolteacher as he travels from his home in Ecuador to New York City, trying to find a friend in the wake of a school shooting. Long recently moved to New York City where he works as an assistant director, editor, and writer. Check out The Drawing blog and Facebook page to stay updated on Gabriel’s latest news.