Me and My Shorts
For some reason I’ve now forgotten I once attended a guerrilla film-making workshop weekend. This is inexplicable as I’d already worked with friends to create a guerrilla-style film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, played several other festivals and even got some modest international distribution. And I’d made a few short films with the same group.
The workshop leader, who’s famous for his workshops or, perhaps more specifically, the ads for his workshops that have long-appeared in film magazines, wanders in and starts screaming at us. One of the first things he screamed was, “DON’T MAKE SHORT FILMS! EVER!” Then he took a really long pause before he added, “EVER!!!” He rhetorically asked the assembly of innocents before him if anyone knew ANYONE who’d ever made ANYTHING from a short film EVER! For what it’s worth, there are several famous examples of short films that evolved into hugely successful feature films, like Fatal Attraction, District 9, Twelve Monkeys, Bottle Rocket (I know they didn’t intend for it to be a short film but they made the short first so I’m counting it), and others. Not only that but I know people who have launched very successful careers based on their short films. Add to that the fact that short filmmaking is what made me realize it’s possible to make something with what you have at hand and that some of those films screened on TV (for which money was earned), and also led directly to me getting some jobs and you have a few pretty good reasons for making short films. So I raised my hand. He grilled me. I impressed myself by being unflappable (which I’m usually not) and he eventually told me to be quiet because I was ruining his act. Having said all that, here are some examples of my short films.
LOVE SEAT (2006)
This is from the dark days when HD could still be prohibitively expensive, particularly for independent filmmakers. We shot this on the Canon DVX-100 which was considered revolutionary at the time. This strange little film was shot in one day with a cast of my closest collaborators and a crew primarily consisting of Dylan Akio Smith (DP) and Jeff Carter (Location Sound). I wrote, directed and produced it and was so ecstatic when it was programmed for the Toronto International Film Festival. It also played Vancouver and Whistler (where it won Best Short) and Cinequest San Jose. After that, I more or less dropped the festival ball for a variety of reasons and even more painfully blew my chance of getting it on the Comedy Network because of insecurity induced procrastination. The music is by my late friend, Ken Aldcroft, from one of his many albums. The editor was Lee Baran.
IN HER EAR (2007)
After the “success” of Love Seat, I had the idea to make four more shorts, each one representing one of the five senses. Love Seat would represent smell. In Her Ear was to represent hearing. I wrote the scripts for the other shorts but never filmed them. One has turned into a feature film script currently sitting as deep as possible on someone’s back burner. I doubt it will see the light of day as it’s a weird script and if Ricardo doesn’t make it (he’s the guy who has it on his backburner) I’m betting no one else will. I loved the other scripts but for a variety of personal reasons (death in the family, birth of a child, you know, small stuff) I didn’t push this film as much as I should have and I generally lost my way for some time afterwards. If memory serves me correctly the one festival IN HER EAR played at was VIFF which is always a great festival to screen at. It’s my hometown festival, it’s the festival I grew up with and it has really great audiences. If you watch Love Seat and In Her Ear you will recognize some locations and perhaps the love seat in particular. There’s a lot I love about In Her Ear – the colours and the performances in particular – but I see it as mostly unsuccessful but not necessarily unenjoyable. If I had to do it over again, there is one sentence I would change. I fool myself into thinking that small change would make all the difference. For what it’s worth, while working on the script for this one I decided to try to write the perfect script. We’d shoot it exactly as it with nothing that needed to be added or taken away. This is where I learned that something always needs to be added or taken away and if it’s not there to take away, you’re in a bunch of trouble. If I was a guerrilla filmmaking guru who liked to yell things at people, I would yell, “DON’T OVER EDIT YOUR SCRIPT BEFORE YOU SHOOT IT! EVER!”