Short film showcases vacationing couple's 'love affair' with P.E.I.
Toronto couple Charley Best and his wife and Cathy Connally did something a little unusual on their recent vacation to P.E.I.: on the spur of the moment, they shot a short film showcasing the Island and submitted it into an international competition.
The Toronto International Film Festival launched a short film contest on Instagram July 6, seeking digital films of 60 seconds or less inviting "aspiring and established filmmakers from around the globe to share their original works," according to the TIFF website. It received a whopping 1,000 entries.
The couple was enjoying their stay on P.E.I. when they read about the contest and decided to enter.
"That's what we spent a good portion of our holiday in Prince Edward Island [doing] — driving back and forth trying to find shots that we felt, in a few seconds, might be a good reflection of Island life," said Best, an entrepreneur in his late fifties who has visited P.E.I. with his wife, for the past couple of years.
"It turned my vacation into a work-cation," laughed Best, who with his wife runs a financial compliance firm for companies traded on stock exchanges around the world. "We have nothing to do with film editing!"
The film is titled I'm Coming Home and is "ultimately about a man who's returning to a place he loves and to the woman who owns his heart," Best said. It was posted by bakingcuisinetravel.fun, Connally's Instagram account, and is just one minute long.
'We just did it'
It begins by showing the Island's patchwork of fields from an airplane window, followed by shots down red dirt roads, of fishing villages and lobster dinners, potato plants brilliant green against the red soil, and beaches.
"We'd never ever done something like this at all," Best said. "It's probably painfully obvious to professional people, but we just did it." They edited it using tools on Instagram, found some royalty-free background music online and added narration.
"She gave me 30 minutes to write out the words, then got me to speak it a few times, and that was it!" Best said.
The couple uploaded the film to Instagram with the hashtag #TIFFXINSTAGRAM, and it's gained Connally hundreds of followers from all over the world, Best said.
P.E.I. is a place that inspires creativity, Best added. "There really isn't a bad shot... the whole Island is essentially one gigantic photograph and video album. We kind of had an unfair advantage."
P.E.I. will 'always' be home
"Always has been, ever since when I was a kid," said Best. "I have memories of the Island that were amazing." Some of his favourites: digging for clams and riding dune buggies over the sand in Souris, P.E.I., — an activity that wasn't uncommon in the 1970s.
As a youth in the 1970s and 80s, Best spent summers in eastern P.E.I. with his mother, Eileen Best. Incidentally, his grandfather was Dr. Charles Best, who was on the team with Dr. Frederick Banting that discovered insulin in the early 1920s.
He's returned often, he said, and his children have spent happy summer days on the Island too.
Big experiment
TIFF is selecting 30 finalists to showcase on its website from August 8 to 17. Those 30 will then be judged by a celebrity panel including actor/director James Franco.
"When Instagram announced that they were expanding their video lengths to 60 seconds we were pretty super-excited to jump on board and do this experiment with them," said Jody Sugrue, director of TIFF's digital studio, via phone from her Toronto, office.
"This gave us an opportunity to tap into a global audience of filmmakers who are kind of doing more experimental and different things, and start to use this as a real official competition space," she said.
There are two top prizes: Judges' Choice and Fan Favourite. Winners get a trip to Toronto for TIFF premieres and to mingle with industry hot-shots.
The two winners will be announced August 18.
The couple said win or lose, they'll likely make more films in the future, because it was such an enjoyable activity.
"We did learn an awful lot," Best said.
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