SHORT: Business Ethics [Wernham Entertainment Inc.]

[Nick Wernham]

Dear DVXUser Community,

Over the past six months our family owned and operated production company has been working alongside some amazingly talented and hard-working friends on our first project. It is a short, dark comedy about a man who runs a Ponzi scheme entitled Business Ethics. We are currently nearing the end of post-production and while at this point I am unable to upload any of the footage*, I would really like to share some of my experiences as a first time director so that I can look back some time down the road and reflect on this exciting period in our company's early days. I'd also like to post a few pictures and would love to hear your thoughts. This has been an incredible learning experience for me and I am quite proud of the work that everyone has done. First though, a few facts about these pictures:

1) We shot on two perf 35mm. With the deals we were able to secure from the friendly folks at Panavision and Kodak the total cost of shooting two perf wound up being pretty similar to what it would have cost to shoot Super 16mm and for the look of this film our cinematographer and I really wanted the finer grain that 35mm provides.
2) What you see here are screen grabs from the 1920x800 (two perf 35mm has a 2.40 aspect ratio) dailies. They are highly compressed and have not been colour corrected. I just saw the uncompressed 2k scan today while we were doing colour correction. It looks A LOT better.
3) The key references for the film in terms of the look were The Shining, Capote, Miller's Crossing, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange and Goodfellas. Yes, I know. A lot of Kubrick. We see a lot of Kubrick homages done by filmmakers of all experience levels done these days, but it seems like (at least among those of us who are just getting started out) they tend to be done ironically. The idea of doing a rather ambitious, unironic Kubrick homage really appealed to me. Obviously there are plenty of shots that reference other films in that list as well as some that aren't listed, but the three Kubrick films are definitely the best-represented (in one way or another).

The Cast

Gil Bellows


Lauren Lee Smith


Julian Richings


Kenneth Welsh


Colin Mochrie


Maxim Roy


Brandon McGibbon


Chuck Shamata


Julian DeZotti

I will add some more shots if there is some interest. I hope that you guys like these, even though they probably aren't the best representation of the quality of the final result.

Hopefully we can get into some good festivals next year and some of you will get a chance to see it and give me some feedback. This film has been a total labour of love for my brother Simon (producer), our father Richard (screenwriter/executive producer), our mother Julia (executive producer), Lori Lozinski (producer), Gil Bellows (lead/executive producer/mentor), Chayse Irvin (our cinematographer), Michelle Szemberg (editor), myself (director) and the rest of our talented cast and crew. Many other people have been involved in this project and I am sure over the course of sharing some stories about it most of them will come up by name, but for now I am tired and just wanted to get this thread started.

Much love,
Nick

*Primarily because we are hoping to have a good festival run in 2012 and posting the film at this stage would almost certainly compromise our chances of being accepted at a lot of places, but also simply because the film is incomplete at this point. It is close, but it is not finished yet.

 

[Nick Wernham]

Journal Entry #1: October 23, 2011 @10:20PM
As the first post in this thread would imply I am starting this journal at a very late stage in the game which in retrospect is a little bit unfortunate. My father began writing the script in early March of this year and after meeting Gil and hiring Lori we began preproduction in mid-May. This is a process that I have a little bit of experience with from my time in film school, but I can safely say that I have no real future as a producer. I'm not the kind of person who is good at juggling a lot of different balls in disparate areas. Perhaps if I were working on something that I was not directing I would be able to do a better job of it, but I have found in the past that the directing side of my work suffers when I am tasked with producing as well.

This time around it was nice to be responsible for the creative decisions that a director is normally accountable for, but shielded from the things that do not pertain to my job. Lori was fantastic. Not only is she a brilliant, creative producer and a great mentor for my brother Simon, but she also struck a very nice balance between teaching me a great deal about production and leaving me out of things that I didn't need to worry about. She was quick to answer any questions that I had and good about approaching me regarding matters which I had forgotten to discuss with her (or, in some cases, was not aware of).

Simon did a great job too. Obviously he is not as experienced as Lori, but he worked really hard and did everything that was asked of him to the best of his ability. My experience working with him confirmed for me that he will make a great collaborator going forward. Our production manager John, the husband of a friend of Lori's, was a great hire as well. He has had a lot of experience working in Toronto and helped us find a number of our key crew people. I feel like I learned a lot from him about the day-to-day logistics of shooting. He was very involved in prep as well. An extremely diligent worker. Simon and he became fast friends during the production.

Our first hire after Lori and John was our editor Michelle who I will speak about in more detail in a subsequent journal entry. For now I'll just say that she did a really great job. After her came my friend Chayse, a very talented young cinematographer who I had worked with previously on another film. When he first joined the union, Chayse was the youngest member of IATSE in history and the reasons for that are clear as soon as you meet him and begin to work with him: not only is he uncommonly gifted at what he does, but he is a diligent worker who is always prepared. He and I spent several weeks talking over the concept for the film's look and when he arrived in Toronto about ten days before we began shooting we spent a great deal of time in the locations adapting my shot list to them. This was an extremely useful part of the process and greatly increased our efficiency throughout production.

Our locations were, when compared with most films, the easiest part of the entire preproduction process for us. This is because we shot six out of our eight days at my parents house in Toronto. In writing his script my father had written many locations which rooms in the house would work well for and in some cases our talented art department was able to transform other rooms to make them look appropriate for some of the other locations. We shot another day at our family's farm just outside the city and another day at my high school alma matter. Done and done. The farm was fantastic. Probably the best location in the entire film. However, in retrospect, while I think the room at the school worked quite well as a university classroom location it would have been better to actually get access to an authentic lecture theatre at the University of Toronto. They are normally quite expensive, but given a bit more time I think that I could have convinced them to let a former student shoot there for an afternoon/night at a reasonable cost.

I will pick up this story a bit later. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions then please feel free to post them here or send me a private message.