Latest posts from National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI)

The legacy of a run-down hockey arena is at stake as peculiar events unfold.

Creative team

Starring: Ron VanDerSwaag, Robert Cormier
Writer/director: March Mercanti
Producers: Adam King, Salar Pashtoonyar, March Mercanti
Cinematographer: Jordan Kennington
Colour: Benjamin Wong
VFX: Adom Woods

Filmmaker’s statement

Having an older brother who played competitive hockey forced me to be around arenas in my early youth. I was always fascinated with them – the smells, the sounds and the strange architecture.

Clean Ice takes place at a 50-year old-hockey arena. However, the film does not explore the sport of hockey; rather, it explores the common Canadian landscape. This film experiments with the power of this landscape’s legacy and what legacy asks of us.

Legacy, by definition, is something that is handed down by a predecessor. The importance of legacy differs from generation to generation. Clean Ice explores this contrast but unwillingly concludes that legacy is inescapable.

About March Mercanti

As a young child, March would play with his action figures (and his sister’s Barbies) for countless hours because he was obsessed with telling stories … to himself. As a teenager he moved onto computer games like the SIMS to create his fictional worlds.

Eventually he attended Toronto Film School where he finally started telling stories to other people, one of those stories being his thesis short film which, apparently, a handful of people liked – it won a best director award. He has since made several short films that have screened across Canada and internationally.

He has learned that a key component to directing is convincing extremely talented people to work with you.

The post Clean Ice appeared first on National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).

An obsessed gamer and his friend build the perfect virtual city but can’t escape their less-than-perfect relationships.

Creative team

Writer: Suri Parmar
Directors: Suri Parmar, Nevin Douglas
Producers: Suri Parmar, Duncan Parcells

Filmmaker’s statement

My films often (fussily) combine analog filmmaking with new media, and Rialia was no exception.

Upon discovering the video game Minecraft (and neither eating nor sleeping for days), I conceived its live-action machinima story about a lonely gamer who seeks refuge in virtual worlds, and connected with designer Duncan Parcells who had made headlines for creating a titanic Minecraft city from millions of building blocks. He not only gave me permission to use Titan City as a virtual film set but provided a refurbished version.

Co-director (and seasoned machinima creator) Nevin Douglas came on board and we devised a production pipeline that would contrast grainy, lethargic live action with immersive video game footage to convey the scope of Titan City (renamed Rialia for the film) and the isolation of Nav, the protagonist.

After my production team and I shot the Super 16mm ‘real-life’ scenes with gaming personality Shaun Hatton, Nevin and I tackled the machinima sequences – a sticky process involving three video game consoles and two television screens. Rialia was then put on hold while I attended graduate school, after which the screenplay needed revising.

Editor Stephen Leck worked miracles to craft a new narrative from b-roll footage. Composing a Minecraft-esque score that highlighted the visuals without overwhelming the story was another conundrum, but musician and sound designer Joshua Hemming rose to the challenge. Inspired by Wendy Carlos, he synthesized pieces by Verdi and Vivaldi into a haunting and suitably gothic aural tapestry.

So what did I glean from making Rialia? My Apocalypse Now? Primarily, that cinema is a hive-mind process. I keep referring to Rialia as ‘my’ film when it’s the product of many brilliant and talented cast and crew members. Food for thought, considering our tendency to regard films as auteur-driven and not a funneling of unique voices. – Suri Parmar

About Suri Parmar

Suri Parmar is a writer, filmmaker and university professor educated at the Canadian Film Centre and Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing.

While she doesn’t confine her storytelling to one particular style, she leans towards liminality: the intervening spaces between moods, moments, mediums and genres.

About Nevin Douglas

Nevin Douglas is a Toronto-based musician, recording artist, video editor and producer.

Through the creation of his animated web series Playtime, he became a specialist in the world of machinima: the creation of original animated content filmed with video games.

He has produced four seasons of Playtime, released seven studio albums, and filmed and edited music videos for himself and singer/songwriter Lisa Marie Kruchak. He has also played hundreds of concerts in and around the Toronto area as the guitarist of rock bands Debaser, The Withouts and Habitat.

Currently, he is working on a new solo album and raising his young daughter.

The post Rialia appeared first on National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).

Nova Scotia gets blasted by accident while baby Billy is in his crib during the infamous Halifax Explosion.

Based on the true story of my grandad, William S. Owen, who was a six-month-old baby in Dartmouth during the Halifax Explosion on December 6, 1917.

Creative team

Writer/director/producer: Josh Owen

Filmmaker’s statement

Billy’s Behemoth Blast was a lifelong dream come true to make. I’ve always wanted to make a Halifax Explosion movie and the story of my grandad, William S. Owen, as a six-month-old baby during the Halifax Explosion was always very shocking and interesting to me.

Grandad didn’t consider himself a survivor, purely because he didn’t remember the event, but I thought that facet of this story was really relatable to modern society’s connection with history as a whole. He was literally there but didn’t remember it, and here I am 100 years later trying to make something that tells the story and respects all those who were affected by this horrible event.

I animated BBB over seven months and had a blast the entire time. This movie has sparked a lot of interesting conversations and I am honoured by the opportunity to have it screen with NSI’s Online Short Film Festival.

About Josh Owen

Josh Owen is an award-winning Dartmouth, Nova Scotia-based filmmaker.

As a writer, director, animator and sound person, his goal is to create a short film for every letter of the alphabet as an opportunity to learn how to personally advance his style of cinematic storytelling, artistically and technically.

His short films employ imagination to try and speak to human emotion, with each film starring some sort of different alphabetic creature that tells a story about some sort of humanistic struggle.

Josh’s films have played Toronto After Dark, Festival Du Noveau Cinema, Festival REGARD, FIN: Atlantic International Film Festival and Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival.

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