This last weekend, something momentous happened. Something that most people missed, but not I, oh no.
You see, this weekend was the premier of The Way to the Heart movie.
Never heard or it? That’s okay. Most people haven’t, but it’s the biggest movie ever produced and shot in the Prince George area. There have been bigger movies shot in and around the north (remember Reindeer Games with Ben Affleck, for instance), but they weren’t produced by Prince George production companies, featuring an all-Canadian cast and crew.
Crew, including yours truly.
I know, it was a shock to me, too.
Indeed, I never set out to do set photography for a movie.
Instead, I got an email out of the blue from one of the producers, Norm Coyne. Coyne is best known as the mastermind behind Northern Fancon, but has been a driving force behind the scenes in Prince George for years. He was executive producer of the critically acclaimed low-budget adaptation of Stephen King’s The Doctor’s Case which was reported by ScreenRant as “The 5th Best Stephen King film adaptation of all time” (and featuring geek favourites William B. “Cancer Man” Davis as Watson and Denise “Tasha Yar” Crosby as Captain Norton.
Coyne said he loved my approach to lighting my photography and wanted me to come light the movie for him. I said I would think about yes.
So, for three weeks last year, I was in Prince George, putting together the paper in my spare time.
I was also asked to bring my camera so I could do some set photography.
Typically, professional set photographers use cameras that don’t make any noise, or they put their cameras into a sound “blimp”, which allows them to shoot silently. I had neither a silent camera or a blimp, which I mentioned to Coyne.
No problem, he told me. Just shoot between takes, or use a long lens. “You’ll figure it out,” he said.
Arriving on set, I discovered that the person who was supposed to be Key Grip (the person who assists the camera man with making sure everything is set up properly) and was supposed to be helping me with figuring out specifics had basically taken control of the lighting department. So instead of “Head Gaffer”, I was relegated to “Best Boy”. If you were to look, the Best Boy’s job description includes: “the day-to-day operation of the lighting or grip department, including the hiring, scheduling, and management of crew; renting, ordering, inventory, and returning of equipment; workplace safety and maintaining discipline within their department; completing timecards and other paperwork; stocking of expendables…” but in this case it meant I had to schlep gear around.
No problem. I can schlep with the best of them. And, when I wasn’t schlepping, I could be shooting.
Having never worked on a movie set, one of the first things I discovered was the role of the crew not directly involved with shooting a scene (typically the director, camera man, focus puller, and sound engineers) is to be scarce. Don’t make eye contact with the talent, said one person, offering me advice. You don’t want them to see you looking at them, and have them look at you, because they should be making eye contact with the other actors on set, and not some rando over there in the background.
So a typical day on set would look like this. Arrive on set about an hour before the cast is expected to arrive. Have breakfast (or lunch, on a late call day.) Get everything set up for the first scene. This might involve setting up lights, or, if shooting on a sunny day, a scrim, which is a large piece of white fabric stretched tight on a frame to make the light from the sun softer and less direct.
Once the lights or scrim were set up, it was off to stay out from underfoot for the next two or three hours as they shot and reshot the same scene.
If you have ever watched a film before, you’ll notice that the camera angle will frequently change. A typical scene between two actors will involve a long shot, where both actors are in the frame, a close up on each actor as they deliver their dialogue, an over the shoulder shot of both actors so that the person who the actor is talking to is in the shot, and maybe a mid-length or alternative angle. Basically, there’s a lot of takes.
Which gave me lots of time in my role as a photographer to try and capture great shots of cast and crew as they worked. But it was a lot faster for me to take pictures than it was for them to film the scenes, again and again and again. So I wound up with a lot of free time on my hands.
What to do, other than sit around and try not to be in the shot? Well, the movie is a Romantic Comedy (a “rom-com”, as it is known in the business (or “in the biz”, for those in the biz)), but it was also a love story to Prince George, reveling in its sense of place. “I can do that,” I thought to myself. Not a love story to Prince George, but a love story to life in Northern BC. To the landscape.
So, during these downtimes, I started to write my own movie script. On my phone, because it was all that I had with me. I had this image of a fish-out-of-water sort of scene with a city boy encountering a bear on a trail while hiking in the north. So I started to write a recent graduate from Toronto who decides to go to UNBC to find himself after the deaths of his mother and his best friend. When I finally got him out on the trail, the bear turned into a woman, and the story became a romance, set in the wilds of BC.
Will anything come of it? Who knows? But, like working on the film itself, writing a complete movie script was an experience, and what makes life interesting? Is the experiences, good, bad, and sometimes even indifferent.
The Way to the Heart is now available on Superchannel’s Heart and Home feed.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
