Mr. Crab will be featured on the CBC Short Film Face Off this Saturday the 23rd of June at 7 pm (Quebec-BC), 8 pm (Atlantic Provinces) including an interview with the director Faisal Lutchmedial. Actor Ryan Singh is also made it out to Halifax, and got a chance to talk about his experience working with Faisal and the rest of the cast and crew. The short film was chosen out of entries from across Canada, and being invited is quite an honour. The estimated audience of the 2011 edition of the Face Off was around a million, so that’s a lot of people who are going to get the chance to see our movie.

Tune in and watch all the films (the first episode of the show is Saturday the 16th of June, also at 8 pm), and support short films being seen – and give the CBC a good reason to continue programming this kind of work in prime time!

You’ll also get the chance to watch the films on the show’s website after each episode, and after the last episode on the 30th, you can vote for your favourite finalist (one film is picked from each episode by the studio audience). We won’t tell you who the finalists were (suspense!) but will say that it’s all worth watching because these are truly some of the finest Canadian short films you’ll have the pleasure of seeing this year.

Taped in Halifax, this program shows 3 great short films an episode and interviews the directors. The studio audience votes on the best film of the night to compete for the final $50k prize so PLEASE come out and support Mr. Crab and director Faisal Lutchmedial. To get FREE tickets, call 420-4752. Ask for Episode 2, May 16th. Bring as many people as you can, and vote Mr. Crab! Everyone who shows up to gets a chance to win an iPad too!

https://www.facebook.com/events/419746661371221/

CBC Short Film Faceoff is a great national competition of some of the best short films made in Canada. It’s the second year of the program nationally (they had a more Atlantic version previously) and the whole Mr. Crab team is excited about this opportunity. It’s pretty rare to have a short play on television at all, but playing on this show in prime time across the country is fantastic.

The basic idea of the show is 9 different films (and their directors) face off against each other, judged by a panel of film professionals and a studio audience. The three top films from this round move on to a final round that allows the public to decide who wins the grand prize. The prize itself quite generous, a $40,000 rental / services grant, and a $10,000 cash grant toward your next film.

Keep your fingers (and claws) crossed for Mr. Crab! More news about broadcast time when we have it.

Mr. Crab, will be making its Toronto premiere on Friday the 13^th of April at the ReelWorld Film Festival, Canada’s premiere festival promoting and fostering racially and culturally diverse artists. The Gondry-esque Mr. Crab follows Rishi, a ten year old boy that idolizes and fears his imposing father, who tells him stories about the crystal clear waters of Trinidad & Tobago.

Mr. Crab plays in the Short Program 2 of ReelWorld. Check out the festival website for information: http://www.reelworld.ca/festival/program-2012/

Screenings:

Friday the 13th at 4pm (Cinema 4)

Sunday the 15th at 3:30pm. (Cinema 5)

You can buy tickets online at http://www.reelworld.ca/ or at the door, 2190 Yonge Street.

I was recently accepted into this program, run by the Writer’s Guild of Canada. The program will be guided by mentors that will help me develop the script and bible to my television drama series “Welcome to Trinidad” for the week I am there, and then for the following three months. The series has been in development over the last  year, and actually was what brought me to Barbados in March 2011 for the Caribbean Tales Symposium and Film Festival. The seminars in Bridgetown helped me develop the base idea, which is I am sure a reason why I was able to get noticed by the Bell Media program. Big thanks to Caribbean Tales and the  workshop leaders for that!

A great deal of the work I have been writing lately has had a Trinidadian or Caribbean connection, including my short film Mr. Crab, which will be playing in a film festival in Toronto just before I participate in the Screenwriters Program (more information on that in the next posting).  The rich culture of the region is unfortunately unrepresented on our screens, and I hope to be part of a wave that changes that.

For more info on my short Mr. Crab, including screening times,  “like” the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MrCrabMovie

And here’s a synopsis my  series in development:

Welcome to Trinidad is a 1-hour television drama-thriller series following a family at war with itself, as the secrets a father left behind in the old country are uncovered by his two sons. Long forgotten horrors return to terrorize the brothers and before long threaten the entire family.

For more information on the Bell Media Diverse Screenwriters Program:

http://www.wgc.ca/action/bellmediadiverse.html

I recently attended the Caribbean Tales 2011 Film Festival / Symposium in Barbados and took part in their Content Incubator, developing a television series called “Welcome to Trinidad”. It was a fantastic opportunity and experience.

The trip didn’t start well though. The plane Tamara and I was on from Montreal to Barbados was halfway through the flight when we noticed it turning and descending. Moments later, the captain got on the p.a. and told us that because of a “small crack” in the windshield we were being forced to land early for safety. Not to worry though, it’s just a small crack, everything is fine, we’re all fine, don’t panic. We didn’t, and within half an hour or so, we had landed in Bermuda (of course famous for mysterious vortex-triangle).

t-shirt in Bermuda

When we walked out of the plane I got a glimpse of the crack on the windshield and it seemed as though the small crack had become a giant spider web covering the entire pane of glass to the front of our airplane. I was immediately not perturbed at Air Canada for the early landing that had ruined my schedule.

We waited for about ten hours before we were able to get onto another plane and finally fly to Barbados, and sadly weren’t even allowed to go through customs and enjoy Bermuda; the very sight of the beaches and sun beyond walls of the airport mocked us. But we did get to our destination, and once there had a beautiful time, working hard, but also getting invigorated by the positive and enthusiastic energy that seemed to permeate through all the participants of the Incubator and festival.

Television and Film Production as an industry is somewhat new to the Caribbean, so there isn’t a lot of support in the form of tax credits or production funds there. Given the amount of talent, some raw and some very polished I saw at the festival though, they should be aggressively pursuing this as a valuable sector in their growing economies. I fall somewhere in between the raw and polished filmmaker categories, and I was able to get here thanks to organizations like SODEC, the Quebec Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts who have supported my development and films. It’s been a long road, but now my work plays in festivals internationally, and I am moving toward making fiction features and television (knocking on wood). Governments in the Caribbean should take note: artists aren’t grown overnight, they take a long time and investment to nurture. But the rewards reaped culturally and economically are well worth it.

With help from the mentors at the Incubator my television series is getting to a place where I feel comfortable pitching it (and myself) to anyone who wants to lend an ear. The idea itself was fairly new when I got there but since then I have already written a new draft to the pilot, focused more clearly on the conflict, and developed my characters’ personalities. Moreso, some keen insights from Michelle Materre and other mentors about marketing have made me rethink how I am going to be presenting my newly completed short film Mr. Crab to the world.

Other highlights: A masterclass by Neema Barnette that focused my ideas about long form filmmaking, and how I want to approach both the series, and my feature, Path of Light. Screenings for great local Caribbean films A Hand Full of Dirt, and The Skin. An impromptu birthday party for Tamara with all our new friends, drinks in the hotel courtyard discussing the business of art, basking in the warm sunshine, and morning swims in the sea with bathing racehorses.

This voyage to the Caribbean was magical for me and I am sure will help my career move forward. I’ve already been invited to attend a festival in Trinidad & Tobago, and a couple of producers have asked me to come and DP their work later this year. I definitely have a feeling I will be spending a lot more time in warm waters soon. Which again all goes to show that even though it may be a long and hard trip getting there, the destination is well worth the trouble.

A short documentary which I shot for Tamara Scherbak in Trinidad & Tobago will be premiering at Hot Docs this May. I am particularly proud of this project because of the “rich cinematography” we were able to shoot came from a very small and limiting camera, the Sony Webbie PM1. We used it because Tamara was competing in a TIFF Talent Lab Emerging Filmmakers competition, and they provided it. It’s a small and low cost HD camera that isn’t really built for filmmaking in any way, but it goes to show that when you use the tools you are given – and know what they are capable of, you can still make beautiful work.

Tamara and I discussed it for a while, and noticed a number of things about the camera. First, the compression is very high, and as a result anything moving becomes jello, or stuttered. Also, it seems as though there is a very high shutter speed when shooting with a lot of light automatically, which I assume is done to lower the light coming onto the sensor rather than stopping down. This is amazingly annoying because it looks as though everything is fast motion (even though it is not) and again stutters and strobes the footage. What we ended up doing to work with that is we went for a super 8 pushed a few stops kind of look (some of that accomplished in color correction) and I think it came out very well. Second, Tamara accented the strobe to add a feeling of desperation in the underwater (or by the waves) shots, which added a sense of uneasyness.  Along with the “haunting musical score” she created, it made the piece really stand out.

We also used an underwater bag which helped us in two ways, one obviously so we could shoot close to the water and underwater, and second, because the plastic of the bag shined from the sunlight and added really interesting lens flares to the footage. The bag itself was about $20, and we got some really nice stuff from that small investment. In fact, we used a bigger brother to that for Mr. Crab’s underwater sequence (and a DSLR), and it worked flawlessly.

Tamara and I will be attending Hot Docs this year in Toronto, so if you are around, please join us at one of the three screenings!

Animation by Eva Cvijanovic for "Little Girl"

Generally the films I make or am a part of take a long time, a great deal of pre-production, and a lot of loving and caring in post. Things don’t always work out that way, case in point, the music video I produced for UrbanHanded Works last month. James Hoffman directed yet another video clip for the United Steel Workers of Montreal, this one funded by FACTOR, and not from the band’s pockets which was nice for a change. The song’s name is “Little Girl” off the album Three on the Tree. Our budget was still quite tight, and we had to call in a few favours, but I have hope that this signals a new stage for the band so next time we can pay our great volunteer crew.

We went from greenlight to production in about three weeks, and James edited the piece in less than 3 days. Our reasons for being rushed were complicated, but basically we had a deadline to send back to FACTOR we didn’t want to try to extend further. It all worked out, and we got the project in on time, which I am very happy about. Deadlines are great because they push us to finally call something “finished” even if we could probably work on it for another few weeks, if not months.

My own short film, Mr. Crab, has taken a long time to produce because I waited for crew to become available and the summer to arrive to shoot. Then in post because I took my time with the picture edit, and gave my musical composer Jawad Chabaan and sound editor Emory Murchison a great deal of breathing room so they could fit in a few other projects. That and festival application season wasn’t upon us. And then… it was.

The result? Rushing at the end. I haven’t worked on a film where we weren’t rushing at the end yet, and I don’t think I ever will. Perhaps it is human nature. We need deadlines to give us a reason to move onto the next project. When you’re an independent artist it can be too easy to work on that project you’ve been nurturing forever, for – well, forever. But there is a bell curve to the benefit that extra time will positively affect the project. Some would argue too much tweaking can hurt a film, and I tend to agree. But where is the healthy balance? I say, make a realistic deadline, and stick to it.

Unless you have to break it, so you can slightly change that shot that has been bothering you for a while. Trust me, I’ve been there.

I’ve spent a lot of the last month working – not on my film editing, but on the job that pays the bills.  It’s a necessary evil most of us independent filmmakers have to deal with, and I try to keep my consumption level low so my expenses are not too bad from month to month.  That way I can live on a part time income, and spend more hours working on what’s important.

The argument can be made the other way of course.  I could spend a lot more time working a really good job, and save to make my films.  Instead of spending time writing proposals and looking for (mostly) government funding for my work, I could use that time pursuing an alternate career.  The fact of the matter is often I would be getting the same kind of funding either way.  But time to me is more valuable, even leisure time.

I’ve been very fortunate in Quebec for funding.  My Cultural Divide got money for both pre production and post from CALQ, and my first professional short fiction Useless Things was funded by SODEC primarily, and then also the NFB and the CBC (who purchased a broadcast license).  It also got the English award from the Writers Guild of Canada during the Cours écrire ton court! competition.   I consider myself very lucky, and even more so for getting another grant from CALQ for Mr. Crab.  Still, these grants pay for the films, and like any other kind of freelance work, if you don’t have a backup plan you might be setting yourself up for financial disaster.

Often, the backup plan is the credit card.  Certainly the worst idea possible, but I don’t fault people too much because I have been there.  I don’t believe in funding a film with a credit card, but I definitely think they can come in useful in emergencies when no work can be found.   Again, yes, I’ve done it, and when I say it’s a bad thing that can take you down a dark financial path, I speak from experience.  It’s something I vow never to do again.

Well, until the next time I absolutely have to make a movie I don’t have money to make, I guess.

Its been a couple of weeks since we finished shooting but we are only getting into the editing now.  Reason is, it took a very long time for my almost five year old computer to transcode the footage from the raw RED files to offline editable files I can work with, as well as converting all the 5D files into prores too.  This has been thus far a learning experience for me, and something I am not used to, since usually I am the tech on shoots and know exactly how everything works – from camera capture through all of post production.  On this shoot, I only learnt how to turn on the RED (I should say boot the camera) halfway through the shoot.

Thankfully, the RED workflow isn’t hugely different on FCP to the P2 workflow that I am very familiar with.  But the process did make me think about how much technical information I have picked up over the years simply because I was making my own films.  This time though I liked not knowing it all on set because if there was a problem other people were there to solve it, rather than me taking up the time I should have been thinking about directing.  On the set of my previous short, Useless Things, we shot on my own HVX200 (along with a Cinevate Brevis 35mm adaptor) and I knew more about how that all worked than anyone on set.  Consequently, when we had more serious technical issues I was pulled away.  That was definitely distracting, especially considering I was acting in the film too…

Emmanuelle Francoeur and Bourbon the Bulldog from Dog Sitter (2010)

Speaking of Useless Things, it will be playing at a screening at the Cinema du Parc this Saturday the 21st of August at 1pm.  The screening was set up by Rail City Media to showcase the newly completed Dog Sitter by director Adam Reider, and produced by me.  We’re showing a number of great shorts at the screening, including Eva Cvijanovic’s Play (winner of the 2008 Air Canada enRoute Achievement in Animation award).  Eva also did the animation for Useless Things – and I can’t wait to start showing people her stop motion work in Mr. Crab.  So, back to editing then!