The toughest communication hurdle I encountered while developing my film came early on during pre-production. I was juggling fundraising and trying to lock in my lead actors, but as a first-time feature director, I hadn’t yet earned the full trust of everyone involved. The real challenge was articulating the feeling of the film — something that’s incredibly hard to express when all you have is a script and a vision in your mind. I wanted to create something highly stylized, and while I shared visual references and mood boards, they only scratched the surface of what I was aiming to achieve. The tone I envisioned didn’t exist yet in any tangible form, which made it difficult to get others to fully grasp what I was trying to build.