Nolen Scott

Our writer Keegan is one of my oldest childhood friends. When he told me he had a Feature script a couple years back, I gave it a read and I really liked what he’d done. He had put some time into getting it developed, but nothing was happening. So I was a bored, out of work as a 3rd AD during the strike, and I thought hey why don’t we make a proof-of-concept? And as the pieces fell into place next thing you know, we were on a set. What attracted me to this script particularly was the duality of Sylvia, and this commentary on the US medical system as well as the threat of extreme heat which is only getting worse and becoming a more universal topic due to climate change.

I wanted to tell Sylvia’s story in a very raw, claustrophobic way. Our DOP Srini Madhavan and I worked very hard to establish a very real sense of heat, and stress in Sylvia’s story. Utilizing extreme close ups, staying with the action and mounting tension, rather than cutting away for coverage. Never revealing or explaining anything, just letting the audience observe.

Keegan was very involved, and on set the entire time. I consulted with him ahead of making my own shot list, and about different character’s intentions. Srini and I worked very closely on the shot composition and shot listing, and I ultimately only Directed the project because Srini and Marci T. House, our lovely Sylvia believed that I could do it. I actually built the original preliminary call sheets and then Brandon Ng (1st AD) took over once I committed to Directing. Dominic Dobrzensky was instrumental as our Producer and LM in getting our location, managing the budget, and getting this thing over the finish line. He’s also entirely responsible for our festival run. Jessie Anthony, our EP got us setup with insurance and helped with approvals in post production.

A main one was finding a location near Vancouver, BC that looks like a desert in Arizona. Another one was our car was an actual death trap, as we did have 911 Film Cars take out the door handles. Those were two of the hottest days of the year in a quarry in Maple Ridge, and our stand in Shannon D’Costa and our actress Marci, of course, and any of the crew unlucky enough to be in that vehicle bore the brunt of that heat. Someone always had to be ready to open the door from the outside. We also made every effort to keep at least one door open as much as possible. We had very strict safety protocols and a very experienced FACS person (Katrina Hucul) from the union world helping us out.

I really do love what we did with the 911 call, with the ECUs and the mounting tension. I also love that push in at the start of the Terry call, and the moments leading up to the glass break. I’m really proud of all the hot wiring sequences because of how hard it was to light, and photograph from the footwell (yet another one of Srini and Gaffer Lisa Ouabbache’s miracles). We had such a great crew honestly. I especially love when Sylvia pulls herself together near the end, puts on her business face, and is ready to play ball with the negotiations. There’s this great moment of reclaiming her power and her capabilities in this scene, and then we end on that high angle slow pull out, which is probably my favourite shot in the entire short with the back-drop of the voice over.

I wonder if there was a better shot for the ‘boot’ reveal? Other than that I feel like with the small budget we had, and the gear we had access to this was pretty much the optimal result. I do think I would have liked to have found a better balance with the music and dialogue. One of our initial final assemblies the music was too loud and the voice overs were too quiet for the phone calls. Unfortunately our lovely sound mixer / sound design engineer Taj Wheeler works in video games and was in crunch time with EA, so it took a long time to get another pass done. When we put it together a second time I may have rushed approval, and now the music seems just a little too quiet and that is entirely my fault. I would say I learned that having a lot of people involved in approvals is a really good thing but that it’s very important that one person, probably the Director, has the ability to say hey, I am happy and most of us are happy, lets move to the next step.

This one! This is my first ever Short Film I’ve directed and I’m incredibly proud of it. It stands out because it tells such a big story in such a small offering. It juggles so many fun logistics and elements, and I got to make it with one of my best friends, and some of my favourite people in the Vancouver Film Industry. It felt so good to make something for us, instead of the studios. We did 2 days, both 10 hours, with a full half hour lunch, and no pre-calls. I’m a big Labour guy so it felt good to do that, to mirror how we do it on a union set but to do so with a 10 hour day opposed to a 12.

Go be a PA! As a PA you’re going to meet amazing people, you’re going to learn the ins and outs of film and you’re going to figure out whether Directing is actually what you want to do. Not to mention you’ll learn to respect the most entry level class of workers. If it is what you want to do, you’ll meet Grips who want to be DOPs, you’ll meet PAs who want to Dolly Grip, and so on. If you have one good idea, and can cobble together the funds or get the grants you need, these people will help make your dreams come true. So just do it. Also time at the video village on set is absolutely invaluable and you can get it by fulfilling many different roles. You can learn just as much stationed with the DOP as you will with the Director because you’ll learn what DOPs need from the Director.

I did read throughs with Marci a couple weeks in advance of shooting to get a feel for how Sylvia should talk and what is driving her. Every now and then we’d refer back to Keegan with a question, and we’d fill out her back story so Marci has a jumping off point for who Sylvia is. On the day I mostly let Marci act on her own instincts, jumping in with notes only when totally necessary. For the villain call I phoned her for real on the flip phone and fed her villain dialogue that way. I worked closely with our voice actors, Donald Sales (Terry), Rene Rebora (Villain), Keegan (911 call), Brandon Ng (William) and Shannon D’Costa (Alicia) in the booth and showed them as much footage as I could to immerse them in that world.

I actually ended up doing the music! For the music I felt like acoustic guitar felt right and I could get away with some post hardcore influenced discordance there, and then I built off of that with more ‘cinematic’ accompaniment . I shied away from drums because of both an aesthetic choice and because my home studio is not well equipped for producing drums. I leaned into a vangelis informed synth approach for a kind of classic melancholy and sense of foreboding and even channeled a bit of post punk and shoegaze towards the end because I feel like shoegaze kind of sounds like heat exhaustion in a way. For the glass break I actually used “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead as a temp score and then wrote my own song with the exact same time signature and structure so that the fill would hit on the glass break. Otherwise I just kinda riffed around and identified points where tension was building and performed accordingly.

After doing the music I passed it over to my good friend Taj, who works in video games and was the original bass player of my first real band!), and I just let him cook. He mostly added things like wind whistling, some heat sizzles, and helped add emphasis to specific moments with a mix of digital and live foley. He did some really cool stuff with his H1N Zoom recorder, such as setting up some blankets in his car and doing touch points. He also captured some rural ambience out in the farms of Delta. He really brought these scenes to life, I can’t stress how important sound design is, and how much it helps the score breathe as well.

We were very open to any thoughts or criticism of the process. We took everything into account, and if time permitted we generally trended towards trying new things. Our editor Shaun Lang was such a great sport, often having to make multiple changes in a cutting session while we explored different approaches and new solutions. At one point I had recorded the Villain part myself and a month later Dom suggested that we go with an actual actor for it. I figured why not, and that’s how we ended up with Rene’s excellent portrayal. It took a while to get there though, and working with Taj to get to the right amount of voice modulation / distortion that the dialogue comes through, while achieving the desired sound. Ultimately this film is the result of the collective ideas and influences of everyone who worked on it, and I like to think that’s reflected on the screen.