Spanky poster designed – as always – by Craig Allen of The Richmond Studio

Joan&Jonas has 2 late night screenings on Friday and Saturday nights at 10 pm, seeing as it’s Rated R and all…The Danger of Secrets, rated PG13, has 3 screenings including a matinee, playing Friday at 2:30, Friday at 10 pm, and Saturday at 5.

Online you can buy TICKETS at

http://www.beloitfilmfest.org/tickets/

We’ll be driving down to the fest in that rolling production office we call a car next week, fueled probably by as much caffeine as gasoline…

Back to our buddies in Beloit! Can’t wait to renew old acquaintances and make some new ones, so don’t be shy and come up and introduce yourselves.

Luzi the clown; Chaplin on a cold
country road

At film festivals like TIFF, they spend a fortune doing promo trailers for the fest that usually run prior to each film program.

Chris decided that BIFF needed something like that to promote the fest – in any case, he wanted to make it for the festival and present it to them as a gift, to be used or not, archived as they see fit.

They love the silent clowns at BIFF, so once he decided that was to be the basis for the short, there was no one better to ask than our own resident clown Phil Luzi.

He is such an adept physical performer that on the day of the shoot, during the bit where he fell when running at the car, the only thing you can hear on the soundtrack is me killing myself laughing. The bit was executed by Phil so gracefully that I had assumed he had done it purposefully.

It was in fact down to his ability to integrate several of the Little Tramp’s moves at once while propelling himself down an icy road – his footwear couldn’t cope with the ice, so that is actually Phil falling at the car.

But he incorporated it so beautifully into the bit by taking a second before popping back to his feet and continuing on that I believed he had been in control while watching him live.

Many thanks also to everyone who helped us, on short notice, put this mad little confection together; Craig Allen and The Richmond Studio, Emily Andrews, Sharon Coates, Jessica Hinkson and Jordan Kanner.

Because it is a promo and runs without credits, we’d like to give credit here:

This is an Ardent Pictures production, written and directed by Christopher Comrie, Produced by Christopher Comrie and Samantha Swan

Featuring

Phil Luzi as Chaplin

Jordan Kanner as the Sundance driver

Emily Andrews as the Telluride driver

Christopher Comrie as the Toronto driver

and

Jessica Hinkson as the Beloit driver

Watch it now on the BIFF site Video Page!

Lucas Madigan did some nice work in his short film Bloor Street Cinema, and we thought we could help some with his next film Joan & Jonas, also written and directed by Lucas.

It navigated through post in September and we are delighted that the Beloit International Film Festival has invited the film to play the fest February 17-20th.

Also, another Ardent short written by myself and directed by Christopher, The Danger of Secrets has been invited to play the festival as well.

It was a pleasure working with Lucas, who is currently hard at work on his documentary feature about comic writer-performer Greg Thomey of This Hour Has 22 Minutes fame.

As a Second City alumnus and an admirer of Thomey’s work in comedy and in the drama The Boys of Saint Vincent, personally I can’t wait to see it.

We’ve been talking to 2 actors we know about playing a pair of Canadian ex-pats in Mexico; Phil Luzi and Jessica Hinkson. I proposed we take what is meant to be a shot of them in their ‘old’ life before Mexico, when they ran a florist’s shop together. The actors were game and had a good sense of humour about doing this, so we agreed – if it didn’t work or we didn’t like the shots, nothing lost.

If you look at this series of images, in order to end up with one that we liked, it does tell a funny little story.

Pansies Are Here! sign; My brain adds an exclamation mark.

Phil and Jessica, as a couple, standing underneath the sign in front of the florist’s.

Perhaps Jessica has realized something about Phil.

This made us all laugh, and gave us something to work with in terms of giving the graphic designer some material he could use.

This is simply candid; I took my chance to shoot Phil and Jess in between poses while they were laughing at themselves. They look lovely here and I just like the photo.

Here is the final art that Craig delivered:

I didn’t tell Craig what the purpose was, but when he finished putting it together and looked at it as a self-contained photo, it made him laugh suddenly.

So it works I think.

Nothing To Declare one sheet

So, of course, since the creation of a dedicated website for The Devil’s Tail, this poor Ardent Pictures website has appeared neglected.

As we worked hard to get the Devil’s site implemented and keep it up-to-date, we continued showing it at various film festivals in the US, which is of course, another full time job in itself.  The entire DT story can be found on its site, and is still ongoing.

Meanwhile work began overhauling this site and on the script for the new movie, thus far called Nothing To Declare.

When we were invited to show Devil at BIFF in February, we knew theirs was a good festival by reputation, and they kept you hopping with press conferences, awards ceremonies, parties, etc., in other words – we were going to be meeting a lot of people in a very compressed amount of time and talking shop.

We decided that, along with doing Q&A’s and promoting The Devil’s Tail, we also wanted to be able start talking about the next feature in a quick concise way by having a one-sheet do the talking for us. So when someone asked “what are you doing next?” we could say “this”, and hand someone a sheet with some nice visuals on the ‘cover’ and a synopsis on the reverse side.

Craig Allen of the Richmond Studio designed this cover for us in fairly short order, and he had his work cut out for him. The actress in the shot is on location in Mexico; the 2 actors were shot by pal Steve Abbott in another country a year later against another wall and digitally placed next to her, complete with their hand-realized shadows against ‘her’ wall….

We’d like to go back to the Yucatan and collaborate again with actors we worked with on The Devil’s Tail, but we’re also discussing the possibility of shooting in the desert as well…

meanwhile interest in The Devil’s Tail continues!

onward and upward…

hope the year brings great things for us all!

and we’re really looking forward to it! / Estamos contentos con anticipación!

Craig Allen, who never complains, flew into immediate action, adding laurel leaves to all our artwork and coming up with that flyer in web and print form so it could be emailed and posted on this site. We printed a small number of those flyers on our own laser printer and distributed them at the Mexican businesses we frequent, as we noticed many local cultural events leave printed material at these particular places, and it’s a great way to reach people who are not online. We also left them at Insomnia, which was hosting the opening night festival party.

We contacted the Mexican Consulate in Toronto who were very pleased to promote the screening, so notice got emailed to thousands of people on that mailing list; a staggering level of support for a cultural event, so thanks to Raul Suarez at the Mexican Consulate.

Thanks to Paco Luviano and Hannah Burgé for notice in their Music Village newsletter and getting DJ Larry Green to plug the screening on the radio on Jazz FM.

Craig Allen also facilitated the artwork of our logo on those cool buttons, which we were able to get for opening night… we treated the festival as if we were out-of-towners and went to the opening night screenings and party and gave those buttons to the audiences and party goers. They are already attending the festival; it’s called preaching to the converted and it works.

This was all to great effect, as we had a full house and got a great response…

Up un-God-ly early Sunday to shoot out in the countryside with Craig Allen, then back to screenings at the festival for closing night. We were exhausted and swore we were only going to attend one program of shorts and skip the party as we had another early day in production-for-hire yesterday.

Good thing we didn’t. We met filmmakers David Rodriguez and Chris Smith who had done beautifully visual work in the different programs of shorts… not only did we like these guys, we exchanged info as one offered future visual effects and the other offered equipment in Mexico on future shoots there.

The benefits from meeting fellow filmmakers at festivals are great, not the least of which is a sense of community…

On to the next festival. DT has been invited to the 8th Annual Boston Latino International Film Festival in late November…

I love these.

Punky little button...

Oh how I love these 1.25 inch buttons…

AND…

The Devil’s Tail has been invited to the 8th Annual Boston Latino International Film Festival!  We couldn’t be more pleased.

They’re still working on the schedule, but we’re likely to play in the 2nd or 3rd weekend in November.

¡Felicitaciones a nuestros estimados colegas!