On September 26, 2015, New Measure Media’s 24/One team assembled. We were five members strong, and we were going to make a great short film.
First thing we did was meet up at NAIT. A couple of us are students there, so it made it really easy for us to operate out of there as our home base for the day. At that morning meeting, we discussed potential ideas, and watch previous winners of the 24/One challenge to see what the judges look for in a short film.
We then carpooled to the EIFF offices on Whyte Ave to receive our secret prompt that was being released at 11 a.m. As part of the challenge, we had to incorporate this secret prompt into our film somehow. In previous years, it’s been as simple as a line of dialogue or a prop, but this year, they made it a little more difficult. We had to use the title of one of the other films showing at the festival as our title, and our film had to somehow relate to the title.
The EIFF Schedule with all of the possible titles we could use for our film.
This proved more difficult for us as we drove back to home base. Our previous plans, although well thought out, wouldn’t work with this prompt. We had to start completely from scratch. We started by going through the list of films to find a title that we thought we could make a film around. After some brainstorming, we decided to go with A Louder Silence. We’ve never seen this film before, but we liked the title, so that is where we started writing the story. That was at about 12 noon.
After about an hour of writing, we decided that we had a script that we thought would satisfy the criteria for submission. A couple people were sent to grab props and lunch as the finishing touches were put on the scrips and location planning was taking place.
After lunch, we went to William Hawrelak Park to shoot the scene were the main character is sitting on the park bench. It was a beautiful day, and we had great sunlight. This also helped us with getting good looking shots for our intro sequence.
We were there for a few hours before moving locations. We did some scouting for our alley location, and we found the perfect spot on NAIT campus, so we didn’t have to drive far for that.
We wrapped shooting around 9:00 PM, and then we headed back to my house to edit. Nick and I edited until about 4:00 AM, when we exported the film. Nick went home, and I went to sleep. I woke up around 9:00 AM to drop off the film in person at the EIFF offices downtown. We we’re the second team to submit.
A week later, the whole team got together to go to the screenings. We didn’t know if our film would be shown, because they initially said they were only going to screen the top 10 films (the ended up screening the top 13 for some reason). We were three films into the screenings when the New Measure Media logo showed up, and I started silently screaming. I was so excited that we actually made it with the top films.
Awards for Best Editing and Best Sound Design at EIFF 2015.
After the screenings were complete, they handed out ballots, and we had to vote on what we thought was the best film. The film with the most votes would be awarded the People’s Choice Award, in addition to $500 in cold, hard cash. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the people’s choice.
But we did win two other awards. One for Best Sound Design and one for Best Editing. We were over the moon. I had no expectation of winning anything, and to be walking away with two awards really impacted me. I am so glad that we got a team together to make this, and I very much look forward to doing it again next year.
You can watch A Louder Silence on YouTube. NAIT NewsWatch recorded some behind the scenes footage, and that aired in a segment on CTV2 Alberta on December 12. That can be viewed on their YouTube channel.