the job description that became Decoys

Job Opening: Seeking 15-20 year olds to work as Decoys for the Food and Drug Administration. Decoys will enter facilities where alcohol is sold and try to purchase merchandise without proper identification or legal approval.

This was vaguely the job application I read to my sister when we were looking for a new job. I instantly wondered what if this job was a scam, due to the dubious way it was written and advertised, and it was just trolling for innocent, underage teenagers to buy drugs for them. Obviously this was not the case since this is a real position with the FDA, but it inspired Decoys.

At the time, I was also dealing with feeling left behind and not “grown up” as most of my friends were all transferring from community college and I was stuck for another year. On top of that, my younger sister was headed to “real” college and having a “real” college experience while I would be living with my parents. This was the emotional side to the comedic storyline in Decoys.

The position in itself is about pretending to be more grown up than you are. That was what I was feeling at the time and it become the main “problem” for the protagonist Andie.

Decoys started a six episode television show where each girl in the friend group encountered a different aspect of “growing up”, then it became a feature length film, then a 15 minute proof of concept. Now it will become a feature again, but the short that exists now is one I am very proud of. It was the largest crew I had ever worked with before and a lot of them were first time filmmakers or first time in the position they were crewing.

Even to this day, I feel like Andie sometimes, but this film is a reminder that I’ll be okay wherever I am at in life.