My friend writer/actor Jack Murray and I met up on Sunday for a walkthrough of our first (hopefully of many) short film endeavours, entitled Miss Familiar.
Jack and I met when I first moved to Toronto two years ago, and hit it off right from the start – himself an aspiring writer and actor with a few credits under his belt, and myself obviously an aspiring writer/director with grand vision: neither one of us with any kind of money to make these sorts of things on our own.
Flash forward two years; I hadn’t heard from Jack in a couple of months when I received an unexpected phone call from him while at work last week.
He was excited.
Jack had been working on writing a full-length feature film – somewhat autobiographical, but definitely fictionalized – about the rise of a budding actor. He began to recount to me his vision of a flashback section to the actor’s early days and his chance encounter with a young woman who he would eventually become involved with romantically – Jack was hoping to turn this truncated flashback segment into a standalone short film, and he was hoping I would direct it.
Having spent the better part of the last two years slowly building up my repertoire of film gear and apparatuses, I felt I would be able to handle things adequately – but I clearly misjudged the quality of my gear.
Once we started the location shooting on Sunday I decided I’d test out an adapter I had picked up from a company called Fotodiox, which allows for the attachment of Canon’s EOS DSLR lenses onto a Sony NEX mount camera – essentially allowing for a 35mm film aspect and look without the need for an excessive, essential (and expensive) industry-standard red rock adapter.
It turns out that this 3rd party piece of hardware works wonders.
The depth of field is phenomenal, and the lighting and video controls are extremely easy to manage and work around off of my recently purchased Sony NEX-VG10 – suffice to say, I am extremely excited about how things are going to go down this weekend. iM photographer Kareen Mallon is going to be shooting production stills for us, and we have a couple extra hands in tow to make sure everything runs smoothly audio-visually.
I’ll be posting some of Kareen’s stills here in the coming days, as well as video updates to keep a log of production progress towards Miss Familiar‘s completion; so stay tuned!
