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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Filmmaker Ron Howard produced Project Imagin8ion's When You Find Me, an experimental film project for Canon.

Director/producer Ron Howard, Oscar®-winner for A Beautiful Mind, recently teamed with Canon U.S.A. Inc., and daughter Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help) on the experimental film project Project Imagin8ion. The initiative is the first user-generated photo contest to serve as the foundation for a Holly-wood short film, the 23-minute-long When You Find Me, with Bryce Dallas Howard directing and Ron Howard executive-producing, in partnership with Francesca Silvestri and Kevin Chinoy of Freestyle, a full-service development and production company.

Actress Bryce Dallas Howard directed the film with the new Canon Cinema EOS C300.

Launched last May, Project Imagin8ion invited photographers of all levels to submit photos based on a series of movie themes: Setting, Time, Character, Mood, Relationship, Goal, Obstacle and the Unknown. The contest ultimately pulled in more than 96,000 photo submissions, which were narrowed down to eight winning photos—one from each movie theme—and became the basis and inspiration for the short film. When You Find Me was shot with Canon EOS DSLR cameras and lenses, the 5D Mark II and the new Cinema EOS C300, which was unveiled just last November. Here, in an exclusive interview with HDVideoPro, Ron Howard talks about making the film.

HDVP: How did you get involved in this?
Ron Howard: The Canon folks came up with the idea and contest, and they presented it to me. I was instantly tantalized by it and thought it was a cool, interesting experiment. It reminded me of other little creative exercises I've done over the years, to shake things up and help think outside the box a bit. I have great respect for Canon, and I've worked with their equipment for decades, so I knew there was a lot of integrity there, and that it would be a stand-alone film, not trying to be a commercial.

HDVP: When did Bryce come on to the project?
Howard: I knew I couldn't direct it, but someone suggested that I could mentor someone, and Bryce had already directed another short and some plays, and I knew she was looking to direct again, so she came on. And suddenly I was involved in a project that made a lot of sense to me. I was fascinated by it, stimulated and challenged by it, with the added benefit of working with Bryce on it. After the Canon team did the initial culling of the photographs, there were 30 finalists from each category put up online, people voted, and Canon also selected some of the winners. My job was then to choose from the 10 finalists.

The EOS C300 offers new PL-mount lenses, such as a 14.5-60mm zoom lens.

HDVP: How did you craft a film from stills?
Howard: This was the really intriguing, interesting aspect of the project. I wasn't sure what it would be like. So Bryce, myself and writer Dane Charbeneau really studied them, and Dane saw a narrative taking shape and very quickly built on it. The visuals I selected definitely guided the story in some unusual ways. There was this black-and-white shot of a couple embracing in a hospital, and another very moody shot of some cemetery gates in Pasadena, shot on a 5D with a Canon EF 17-40mm wide-angle lens, and a great shot of a tree; and the credit goes to them for shaping it into something very organic. Ultimately, it's a very personal film to Bryce. I don't think you'd ever imagine that certain scenes were actually inspired by individual photos, or that the whole story was built around these eight photos. And it really worked. I knew that we would want to make a film that was character-driven, so it wasn't strictly a visual exercise. So we were looking for that kind of narrative, and that focused my thinking.

HDVP: So you weren't necessarily looking for the best photos, right?
Howard: Exactly. That would have been impossible anyway, as we had 80 spectacular, beautiful shots to choose from. So it was selecting shots that would be challenging, but viable building blocks for a story. And nothing was certain then. It just grew from that into this drama, 23 minutes long. It's an emotional story about two sisters and a crisis in their early childhood, and how the fallout from that early experience continues to resonate and color their relationship in their adult lives. There's also an element of the supernatural involved, a sort of magical realism, and much of the beauty and visual whimsy and sense of mystery was inspired by the photos we chose. And the characters and their world were also influenced by the images. So I think when the contest winners see the film, they'll be very proud. We didn't play fast and loose with the spirit of the contest. We didn't copy every image literally, but we clearly took visual and thematic inspiration from the photos, and it's very present in pivotal moments throughout the film.

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