Beneath Us is a cautionary tale of what can happen when migrants looking for a better life are vilified and forced to live in an “underground” economy. People need to feel what it’s like working in a factory, lost in a life of debt and poverty, making the things we touch and wear everyday. This is the disconnect I’ve been trying to bridge with my films, first by being the second generation immigrant bringing viewers to back to my mother’s home country as I did in My Cultural Divide (2006), and now bringing the factory literally into our backyard. Do we choose to treat factory workers differently because they live a world away? Or is it that we don’t care where things come from at all, as long as they are cheap and plentiful?

I want to bring this dystopian but all too real world to screen, and fill it with believable characters with relatable human dreams and faults. Sometimes a fiction film is capable of allowing an audience to experience the reality of something better than a documentary, and this is what I hope to do with Beneath Us. The factory in the short may not exist within the borders of the United States or Canada, but the result is the same – workers are exploited and then ignored by the people who gladly buy the things they make.

OAC is only supplying some of the funding so our team will be reaching out to the community to try to finance the rest of the budget. Contact us through this website, and we’ll definitely keep you up to date when we start our crowdfunding campaign.

James Hoffman’s short film has been accepted into the NSI Online Short Film Festival, and you can watch it right here too.

The story: Avery wishes he were the kind of man to make friends, go back to school, find a girlfriend. Unfortunately he’s haunted by self-doubt, the ceaseless swirl of thoughts running through his head, and the ghost of the man he witnessed being murdered in the park. The ghost, Vik, wants the answer to one question: ‘Why didn’t you help me?’

The link to the festival, where you can watch the film in its entirety, is here: http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2013/02/things-worse/

I produced this short film, that Adam Reider wrote and directed. It’s a disturbingly funny window into the life of a pretty girl with a dark soul.

Adam’s work is twisted and unique. His latest project is a reality-web-doc series about a guy who has only eaten 5 things his whole life. It’s pretty great too, to find it go to www.railcitymedia.com

James Hoffman recently finished his short film “Things Worse”, which I acted in and produced. We had a cast / crew / friend screening at Montreal Improv last week to watch that and a few other shorts (The Audience & Encounter Abroad by David Eng, Only Sky and Water by Tamara Scherbak, Once Upon a Many Time by Eva Cvijanovic, Where the Heart Is by Adam Reider, and Cry Baby by Gabi Kislat & Emory Murchison) and it was a fantastic show. We also played a few of the music videos James and I have worked on over the years, as well as a number of others by some very talented friends.

I don’t think we do this enough actually – it is so rare that (film & video) friends get together to watch each other’s work. It’s a shame, and I was thinking that perhaps we should make it more of a habit to get together to socialize and watch the things that we toil so long on but so few of us get a chance to see. Film festivals are great and all, but sometimes I just want to see a few films by people I know rather than strangers (regardless of how good they may be).

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.

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

“Dog Sitter” a short film directed by Adam Reider which I produced will play at the Tromodance film festival in New Jersey April 22-23, 2011. Congrats to Adam, who is very excited to have his first film play at a film festival, and to the entire cast and crew who worked on the project. More details to come once the festival works out their schedule.

Here is a link to my bio Caribbean Tales put up on their site.

http://caribbeantales-events.com/?page_id=3673

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.

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!

We finished shooting Mr. Crab a few days ago and I am still exhausted from the process.  I can safely say this film was one of the few I have shot where virtually nothing went wrong during the production.  There were some mishaps of course, and we went a little too long on a couple of the days, but for the most part it went off without a hitch.  Key element: Pre-production.

Katarina Soukup, David Eng, and Caroline Bacle did a bang up job in making sure we had everything we needed to make this production work, and I can’t recommend them enough.  Them, along with all of our crew who stepped up when problems came up made the process so smooth.  And importantly it allowed me the luxury of only having directing to think about.

Osheen Harruthoonyan (DoP) was fantastic again (he shot Useless Things and My Heart is Black for me previously), and I am so looking forward to editing together the images we captured.  We worked out the lighting plans and the shots together a long time before the shoot, and somewhat surprisingly didn’t change much from my storyboard (actually, I don’t draw, so it was more like a photo-storyboard really)

And of course our actors, Cindy and Vian Persad, and Ryan Singh were phenomenal, and brought the characters on paper to life.  There was a lot of effort put into our casting, including a couple of trips into Toronto – and I was very happy to find the talent we did.  In actual fact, there were a lot of people who auditioned who were great, some of which I may end up casting in the future.

So, here  we are.  All that work for 6 minutes of screen time.  The new hard drives just arrived at my door.  I’ve got to start working again.

(from left to right) Ryan Singh as Gobin, Cindy Persad as Sandy, and Vian Persad as Rishi.