Dead North 2016

The week after submitting my film was a long, long week.

Last Friday, I hopped on a 1st Air flight and soon enough ended up in Yellowknife.

It's here that I want to thank Ashley & Deanna Geraghty and their family. Hotels were a little out of my budget for the trip, but Ashley (a fellow Dead North filmmaker) invited me to crash on an army-cot in his basement (which ended up being a whole room and a comfortable bed). They picked me up at (and delivered me back to) the airport, showed me around town, fed me breakfast and were just generally incredibly awesome! Thank you Geraghty's! They also make deliciously-twisted little horror films!

I had an amazing time in Yellowknife, but what was most amazing was the reception to our film!

There were a number of special guests present for the festival, and everyone that saw it had nearly all good things to say! The few things people did call me to task on, I knew about and were caused by the short amount of editing time on the film or needing a pick up shot here and there. When you work on something in a vacuum, you really don't know if it's going to be any good or not, especially when it's your first and you aren't sure that you even know what your doing.

I spent hours talking to several of the Dead North judges: Ant Timpson (a professional producer from New Zealand), Matte Aebig (an incredible VFX artist, that's worked on pretty much everything), Nyla Innuksuk (owner and senior producer of the virtual reality production company Pinnguaq Productions), Chris Wood (who runs the Capitol Theatre in Yellowknife), and Dan Sokolowski (producer of the Dawson City International Short Film Festival). Google them if you want to know more, they are all amazing people and I feel really grateful that I had a chance to spend so much time chatting with them. The most amazing thing, all of them said they liked our little film, and I was told by one person that we had the best opening scene in the whole festival!

During and after the festival, each of the special guest judges held a workshop on some aspect of film, I went to all of them, and learned a lot of interesting and valuable things. Being an artist, Matte's was especially cool; being able to see how easy it is to make gelatin make-up and prosthetic appliances was eye-opening!

I can't wait to go back next year, with a finished film this time!

I also can't thank Jay and Pablo, the guys from Artless Collective enough. It's obvious they poured blood, sweat and dollars into making Dead North happen, all for the love of film, and that's awesome on so many levels. Also, thank you Meagan Wohlberg (Dead North Festival Organizer) for helping guide us to all the right places and telling us what parts of our scripts needed help.

My whole weekend rocked so hard, and it's thanks to all these people, my cast, crew and my awesome woman Sally!

Here are some additional behind-the-scenes photos from the production (taken by my awesome woman and master behind-the-scenes picture taker person... just look at them, they are great:

Out snapping greenscreen background plates with the Umma!

Taking my photo while I take a photo... how meta!

Wouldn't be a successful shoot without a 'frosty-stache'!

My actors... nailing it.

Cool, alternate angle of a scene in the film.

I had no time filming to realize how fricken beautiful it was out there!

Shooting some of the tunnel sequence green screen shots.

Topsey, killing it!

Still killing it!

Adrienne is ready for her close-up!

And... here it is.


Oh, and here is a link to the 'Festival Cut' of our film, you know, in case you wanted to watch it or something.


Old Ways (Dead North 2016 - Festival Cut) from Jeff Jones on Vimeo.

Comments

Popular Posts