Movie cameras will soon focus on The Logging Road. This is the title of a proposed film by Prince George filmmaker Daniel Stark, a film that just got the investment it needed to roll film.
Stark and the creative team from 6ixSigma Productions applied to the StoryHive competition held recently for digital short-films. This Telus-based competition required applicants to earn their way to the judged rounds by getting fan votes, then facing a panel of judges. The Logging Road was one of 47 projects from the combined region of B.C. and Alberta to each get a $10,000 cash injection, out of the hundreds that applied.
"Its going to essentially allow us to bring in some talent you often don't get to have on productions budgeted like this, and it means it can be handled with a more professional degree of filmmaking," said Stark.
"We won't have to cut corners and let quality slide just to get the bare minimum done. We have budgeted to reach certain goals and this means we can meet those goals."
The Logging Road team also includes Jason Hamborg, Jon Russell, Glenn King, Daniel Pousette, Meagan Howard-Gibbon and Eliza Houg on the initiating production team, and Stark said many others will be called in to help.
The synopsis used to attract StoryHive attention explained the premise behind the fictional story that had some thematic connection to the Highway of Tears tragedies.
"A young highway officer's anxiety runs wild after finding a suspicious vehicle idling down an empty logging road," Stark described. The finished story will be "a very grey film inspired by tensions and anxieties that exist in Northern B.C. around Highway 16. The story plays out with a deep sense of dread and paranoia built up by the history of the highway, its ever-present feeling of dangerous isolation, and an officer's personal struggle with stress. The film's only aim is to ask questions about how these situations could be handled."
The script has already been drafted in preliminary form. Stark will meet with a StoryHive advisement team later this month to get the final instructions from the chief funders, and then he and the production crew will get underway.
The deadline to complete the film is this August.
