Butterflies

Butterflies is a sexy and hilarious short film about two beautiful people who are meeting each other for the first time. Their perfect blind date is set to become the perfect night, until an all too familiar series of events is unleashed. Is true love powerful enough to overcome the ultimate humiliation?

Shot in beautiful super-16mm on location in Toronto, Canada, Butterflies is a collaboration between some of Toronto’s top film industry professionals. An official selection of the 2005 Edmonton International Film Festival, this 5-minute short will be making the rounds on the festival circuit throughout 2005/06. For distribution, please contact Yee Jee Tso or Ivan Cermak.

photos courtesy of Michelle Yee

The Winner

Obviously, it started with an idea. Five actors sitting around looking for another exercise. We decided to explore and improvise with characters based on exaggerations of our own personalities. But we needed a conflict, so what better idea than the discovery of a dead body? All of a sudden we had the plot for a short film. An improv was performed in front of the camera. Yee Jee used the improv and general idea of the story to map out a screenplay. But JYMDICK is about teamwork, so every member had the opportunity to re-write their characters and add their ideas to the story. It’s tough enough writing a screenplay on your own, let alone with five people! But we did it and we still talk to each other.

We all had had experience on set watching filmmakers do their thing, so we had a sketchy idea of how to tell a story in moving pictures. Movies require money and we scraped together 2 grand (that’s Canadian money!) We made a list of crucial crew positions and realized we needed outside help, a lot of it. So we called up friends that we knew we could rely on; some were really experienced at their jobs, some not so much, but everyone stretched their talents for us. Caron, bless her soul, took charge of feeding the crew with a skimpy budget. After knocking on many doors she managed to get Domino’s Pizza to donate lunch for two days of our shoot. Caron’s organized shopping and personal cooking covered the other days. That, unfortunately, wasn’t as successful. To this day it’s known as “rice surprise”. But we lived through the smell and there were enough munchies to survive on. Of course we had to rent the gear and get insurance as well. Money…. gone. We got a big helping hand from the folks at PS Production Services a la Ian, our gaffer. And for the details, we got creative. For example, Darren made a slate out of a clipboard and angle brackets (it worked beautifully). When we forgot to bring it to the 2nd unit shoot, he made another one out of spit and paper clips.

Aah, 2nd unit. Usually a luxury of bigger budget projects – for us it was a necessity. We had to trash a whole day’s shooting from the previous weekend due to technical difficulties, and had to make up eight and a half pages with no money to rent the gear another day! So Ivan nabbed a skeleton crew for a night shoot into the wee hours with coffee and Tim Bits. Turning night into day made us feel like real filmmakers, and it came out looking great. By this point we were rounding the learning curve like Speedy Gonzales. After the last day of shooting we felt like old pros and nobody wanted the project to end…..we were having too much fun! Is this right? What happened to nervous breakdowns, screaming directors and high maintenance actors? Everyone felt beautiful for our undertaking and we popped cheap champagne to celebrate the end of principle photography.

Postproduction was another “learning experience”. Ivan had to learn very quickly how to use his computer and edited the gag reel out of 4 hours of “behind-the-scenes” footage. Yee Jee dusted off his home studio to engineer the sound. Michael got us a venue for the screening, where the bands in the soundtrack would play live for our audience. Caron continued her door knocking and Darren made the JYMDICK trademark vignette. Each of the JYMDICK members found talents they never knew they had. Like lip-syncing. We had to do some automatic dialogue replacement, but without the “automatic”. Gary, our editor, and David Richardson at Flashpoint Cutting saved the day when it came to piecing the show together, and Matt helped us out with title animation, even though he spelled Darren’s name wrong. (Sorry Darren, it stays……it’s a money thing). From the original score to the cheesy sound effects and the sketchy-cam title sequence, everyone pulled stuff out of thin air to make a project that, for a first film or any film, was polished and professional.

JYMDICK learned and grew with the making of “The Winner” and succeeded in celebrating their craft. We hope that people will be inspired by the fact that a bunch of actors pulled this off. A big (or existent) budget isn’t required to tell a story well. Follow your passion, and everyone comes out - the winner.