Adeline is 12 years old, but she has never had a birthday cake. 

What she has had is a childhood in a post-apocalyptic desert, learning about the “Old World” from her mother. After her mother tragically dies in a dust storm, Adeline sets out to find the ingredients for a cake in hopes that she can blow out the candles and make a wish to bring her mother back to life.

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This is the story of “Tall Tales,” a short film from the mind of School of Cinematic Arts alum Lana Nguyen, who graduated in 2021. The film takes place in the year 2541, but its themes are universally relatable.

“I’m really fascinated by coming-of-age stories that have really young characters who live in mature worlds and the juxtaposition of that,” Nguyen said. “I’m really interested in telling the story about this little girl who lives in this desolate world and has to work through her grief, and what that might look like.” 

Producer Anmol Bajpai graduated from USC in 2021 with a degree in communication. Bajpai knew Nguyen during his time at USC and eagerly joined the “Tall Tales” team to tell Adeline’s story. 

“[‘Tall Tales’] is a coming-of-age adventure, in the vein of ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ or something like ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” Bajpai said. “It’s got a lot of heart to it, but there’s a bit of an edge and magical realism element.”

As a teenager, Nguyen loved young adult dystopian film series such as “The Hunger Games,” “Maze Runner” and “Harry Potter,” which inspired her to choose a similar genre for “Tall Tales.”

“I miss that era. I feel like it definitely informed my sensibilities as a storyteller because I just grew up thinking, ‘I want to make movies like that,’” Nguyen said. “I definitely love character-driven stories in the genre space.”

While “Tall Tales” isn’t “hard sci-fi,” its futuristic, barren landscapes emulate the films that influenced Nguyen’s own coming of age. The decision to situate the film in arid deserts and lush forests allowed the “Tall Tales” production team to scout local locations in Southern California.

“As a storyteller, it’s really hard to do genre in the context of a short film just because of budget constraints, and so setting it in this bare landscape for me makes it possible to still explore genre and world-building but on a really small scale,” Nguyen said. “I do want to learn how to tackle world building and production design, and this feels like the microcosm of that.”

“Tall Tales” is currently in the pre-production stages, fundraising and casting with the goal of filming this summer. Nguyen hopes to tell her story with a young Asian American actress.

“As an Asian creative, I’ve struggled a lot with feeling like every story I tell has to be about being Asian,” Nguyen said. “‘Tall Tales’ was very different for me where it’s not inherently about being Asian American or Asian … It’s more about finding your way as an orphan and finding a found family and going through the motions of grief, but it was still important for me to think of my protagonist as a young Asian girl.”

Producer Rhys Kroehler met Nguyen when they were both majoring in film and television production at USC. After Nguyen pitched the logline for “Tall Tales,” the pair worked to flesh out the dystopian world to create a universal story of grief, loss of innocence and found family. 

“The biggest theme is about this loss of innocence of a child taking their first steps into the bigger world beyond the safety of their home and their family and learning for themselves how to navigate a new and sometimes scary and challenging environment,” Kroehler said. 

Bajpai said the original iteration of the film was based on many people’s fears about the coronavirus pandemic, which reflected similar sacrifices and emotions in Adeline’s narrative. 

“People were so paranoid of, ‘What would the next 10 years be like? Is this going to be forever, this new state of being?’” Bajpai said. “So, it was kind of a reaction to that, the story of, ‘What if all the simple things that we love and that we weren’t able to experience in the pandemic — what if they disappeared?’”

The anguish that Adeline experiences while navigating a desolate world paralleled the collective grief people felt during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Kroehler said. 

“Lana’s talked a lot about the way that the pandemic created this isolation for people,” Kroehler said. “We became very insular, and there was a fear of the outside world. Stepping back out into that was a journey that people had to go on.” 

As the “Tall Tales” production team developed the plot further and honed in on its key themes, Bajpai said the story took on new significance.

“We went a step beyond that and used our story to really be a commentary and acknowledgement of a recent devastation that I feel like our planet has been dealing with,” Bajpai said. “All these young kids who you see on the news, who are either orphaned or on their own, [have] to live the rest of their life growing up so fast at such a young age.”

Nguyen hopes “Tall Tales” will diverge from the many stories with young protagonists that only deal with childish themes. While she acknowledges the constraints of the short film format, it’s still important that “Tall Tales” has “diverse faces on screen and they’re not tokenized for that.”

“I definitely want to tell a story that respects someone who’s really young and meets them at their level and really just explores this space through their eyes,” Nguyen said. “It’s important to create spaces of inclusion and to create stories where you can have people of color, and it doesn’t have to be about being a person of color.” 

Kroehler emphasized that the network and community of peers he found in SCA has served him far beyond his time as an undergraduate. Working on “Tall Tales” gave him the chance to reconnect with SCA classmates and friends.

“Our cohort of 50-something people, they’re all still friends and they’re all people that I respect and admire, and I learn from every day,” Kroehler said. “Continuing to do these projects with people outside of school, not just in the school environment is incredibly rewarding. Working on anything with your friends is more enjoyable than doing it with strangers. It’s a story that we all believe in.”

From the original logline Nguyen pitched in her SCA class to the full-fledged production that will begin filming this summer, “Tall Tales” is ultimately a meditation on the complexities of growing up and finding yourself.

“[‘Tall Tales’ is] about simultaneously the dangers and the loss of innocence, but also the beauty of the world around us,” Kroehler said. “It’s about focusing on those small moments and the small, beautiful things about life that is the magic of the world. So, the story looks at the duality of those two things, the danger and the beauty.”