Two of the most tiring, terrific days of Jon Chuby's and Dan Stark's lives have beamed their talents onto the big silver screen.
Chuby and Stark are the Prince George amateur filmmakers who can less and less be put under the "amateur" umbrella. Their production company, Picaroon Pictures, has made some of the most acclaimed work a local film project has ever garnered, and they have just done it again. Their short film Behind The Reds just cracked the official top 15 in the 48 Film Project, an international competition with top prize being $100,000 in filmmaker money (they didn't get the money prize) and the finalists (they did earn this honour) getting screened at a special viewing for the Directors' Guild of America.
"Who would have thought our crazy blood-spattering short film would make its way onto a Hollywood screen?" said Stark. "I am so thankful for everyone that was a part of this thing. Our team was extremely talented, patient and committed to making something we are now proud to share. I love the amount of effort that went into making a film as ridiculous as this."
The contest required that entrants log into a website during a particular entry period. The rules permitted a lot of work could be done in advance to get things ready, but there was also a technique used to ensure it was all fresh material. Once they hit the start button, the website gave them certain instructions that had to be incorporated into the final film, then they had 48 hours to come back with their finished project.
"Once we started filming on Saturday morning we didn't finish shooting until one in the morning on Sunday, uploaded the footage and caught some sleep then as that was happening, but then edited until Monday morning when we had to submit," said Chuby. "We had some technical things we ran into, so if we had a bit more time we would have fixed some things, but at the same time, we were so tired at that point that we weren't sure anymore if the fixes were rational decisions. There were times there at the end where we would start a task then blank out on what it was we were doing. But we hit the laughs we really wanted, we hit the important storytelling points we wanted to hit, so we were very satisfied with what we could do within that timeline. We pulled off things we wouldn't have otherwise been able to pull off if we hadn't done that prep work."
The location was set up in advance, and they picked a place that could serve all their needs in one spot. Chuby was a cast member of Judy Russell's production of Evil Dead: The Musical this past autumn, so he got ideas about using the P.G. Playhouse. He also solidified some of the main cast members from that live production's group.
The full cast of Behind The Reds consisted of Adam Harasimiuk, Amy Blanding, Bradley Charles, Shaun Christy and Chuby (non-dialogue appearances by Jim Chuby, Edward Quinlan and Carly Tayler) with a large group of extras starring as themselves: a live audience.
"We thought a lot about things that would set our production apart. What's going to up the ante over some of the other groups? We thought if we could show we had a live studio audience, that would up the production value. And it worked really well," Chuby said.
Not knowing what the spontaneous elements provided by the competition would be, the long planning process had to wait for its cues, which meant not having any sort of plan other than be ready with a group on standby who possessed a number of utilitarian skills, ready for action no matter what that action might be. There was a writing team ready to take the preconceived notions and marry them with the secret elements, and a costume and makeup team was on standby to respond as well.
Holding the filming session at the playhouse also ensured various and sundry performance areas, props, costumes, sound and lighting equipment, makeup tools, prep space, etc. were all close at hand, as needed.
"A lot of planning went into how we would do it, even if we didn't know what we would be doing. We just gathered people's skill sets and gathered resources we would need, then waited to find out how they would be utilized," said Chuby.
Another who was on hand, semi-prepared but unable to execute until the exact moment of need, was musician Eric Wynleau. The Black Spruce Bog band member (as is Blanding from the acting cast) was the principal composer of the music that, like the live studio audience, Chuby and Stark felt would be a valuable extra production element. Wynleau's music skills were put to the spontaneity test, since he couldn't apply any music until he had the final edits with which to time the notes and rhythms. He couldn't add that icing until the cake was solid.
The most difficult of those moments was a macabre tap dancing number (dancing double Melissa McCracken was the dancing legs double for that scene) when Wynleau had to hit some tight visual marks with the music he had to play live to the action.
Also helping Stark and Chuby on the technical side of the filmmaking process were other local auteurs who came in as camera operators and other special skills of the trade, like Jason Hamborg of 6ixSigma Productions and Mike Mira of Sonic Interactive Solutions.
When the first edit of the film was strung together, it ran eight minutes long. That was tight shooting considering the contest maximum was seven minutes. No scene needed to be cut, only some shaving of the footage.
This speaks to how skilled Stark and Chuby are getting with their filmmaking work. They have already made a significant body of work.
Chuby was a finalist for a MuchMusic video competition in 2009, he directed the short horror film The Last Laugh included in Scene PG Magazine's The Screaming Room filmfest, and the combination of Stark and Chuby (also Jeremy Abbott) went deep in the long-running CBC-TV ComedyCoup sit-com challenge where their concept show Geoff & The Ninja made it into the final 15.
Now this. Behind The Reds is the only Canadian film to make the finals of the international 48 Film Project.
"We are getting there," Chuby said. "We are learning lots and lots as we go, and we're getting so we are consistently placing well and generating material consistently at this caliber. We are learning what our pitfalls are, and how to get a handle on them. We are starting to get quite a community built around what we're doing, so that means our next production will have a lot of people and other resources ready to go when we do it. We have about four scripts ready to rock, one especially, and we have plans on where to enter it. It's a straight horror production that will run probably about 20 minutes."
Watch local screens for that upcoming production. Hollywood directors of all sorts, meanwhile, will watch Behind The Reds on Feb. 9 at the competition's film festival in Los Angeles.
