Writers' Block Turns Into Film

The opening scene of About The Girl, shot in late September

at the mouth of Duchesnay Creek.

Writers' Block Turns Into Film

DAWN CLARKE
Community Voices
North Bay Nugget


Mike Humble turned writers' block into an award-winning screenplay ... About The Girl.

He admits he was writing a novel when he came to a gap in the story.

He put the novel on hold and turned his attention to a writing the screenplay, a first film for Somerset Productions.

"I've since finished the novel, but I thought making a film would be different," he said. "It was different; it was a whole different challenge. I thought having others involved would give me accountability to finish it."

So he turned to his friend Patrick Gilbert.

Mike and Patrick started Somerset Productions about eight years ago when they were working on a comic book.

"It didn't go anyhwere, but we have a single copy of a cool comic book, which is kind of fun to have."

Mike admits About The Girl was initially an exercise to see if they could make a film.

The duo brought in their friend Kevin Hoffman and recruited a lot of other friends to do sound, acting, and background. But still, there were problems and the crew quickly experienced its first excercise in creative problem solving.

They had been filming under a bridge on Main Street West.  the weather was bad and the wind continued to blow all day.

It wasn't until they started looking at the footage that they realized that the microphone cord had banged against a post for the duration of the shoot.

Patrick Gilbert, Ed Regan, and Kevin Hoffman prepare to film

a scene at the parking garage in downtown North Bay.

"We re-recorded all the audio inside and synced the actual script to what we were doing on screen and then built in actual layers of ambient noise like cars passing by, busses in the distance, and a little bit of rain," Mike said. "It was the first big challenge we had to overcome."

Because most of the cast and crew had day jobs and families, scheduling became an issue.

Filming started in September when the trees were green, but by the time it was finished the trees were bare and three inches of snow fell the night before the final day of shooting.

the entire length of King's Wharf had to be shovelled so the scene could be shot.

"It was a testament to our commitment to get our scene," said Mike.

There was one more step before About The Girl would be ready.  Mike sent it to a friend in New Liskeard.

"He wrote the music for it and it made the world of difference," he said. "You tend to think of film as a visual media, but you realize very quickly sound is just as important as what is on the screen."

Everyone was excited about the final product and they realized it was much different than they had anticipated. They decided to tak a chance and submit it to film festivals.

"We won best cinematography at the Northern Ontario Film and Music Awards," he said. "we were up against an Imax film about the Great Lakes and the rest were all heavily granted with government and BRAVO money.  It inspired us to keep working at it."

That was just the beginning for Somerset Productions. The follow up film was The Lake, which proved to be a bit more ambitious than its predecessor.

"We had a whole scene set in the 50s which presented a series of unique challenges," said Mike. "We went to Canadian tire on a Tuesday and recruited some of the vintage cars and we rented a few vintage bathing suits from a costume house in Toronto."

Bob Clout agreed to be aprt of the movie, and Mike admits he had the local veteran actor in mind when he wrote the script.

The crew set up a shot on the last day of shooting About The

Girl. From left, Kevin Hoffman, Ed Regan, Jeremy Cormier,

Mike Howard, and Michael Humble

"Kevin approached him with the script and he liked it," said Mike. "This put pressure on us. We had actual talent. With the first productio, we would rehearse the day before, or when we were setting up."

This was not the case with Bob who insisted on several weeks of rehearsal.

"The Lake is a simple story that I wrote in high school," said Mike. "It is based on a pretty naieve adolescent view on lov. I had to change quite a bit of it. Hence the difference between a story that works in print and one that works on screen."

Again, everyone was proud of the finished product and again it won the best cinematography award in Sudbury and the best international short at the Film North International Film Festival in Huntsville.

Next came the movie Missing and Mike, who wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it, said they surprised themselves.

"Pat did most of the shooting and used different angles and editing techniques," he said.  "Kevin edited and made some interesting choices as far as the music was concerned. It was a collaboration between the three of us."

Right now, Mike is developing a mockumentary, which he explained is a documentary with some not-so-real elements.

It's about a sasquatch creature that lives in the wilderness around Cobalt that he heard about when he worked as a journalist for the Temiskaming Speaker.

"I thought it would make a great film about friends going in search of Old Yellow Top," he said. "I have a passion for storytelling and when I first heard the story I was pretty sure it was just some of the locals pulling my leg as the new guy in town. But I was surprised when I actually found news stories about it."

While Mike hopes that Somerset Productions will be able to continue making movies, he admits they first have to figure out how to make it economically possible.

"It would be awesome to achieve some sort of sustainability."

A Quick Note About New Pages

Hello again,

Sadly, this is just going to be a brief post about some new additions we have made to this page. As many of you will have noticed already, there is a link to our Twitter feed in the column to the right. Straight above, just below the Somerset Production masthead, you will also find new section about our first two "Somerset" Productions About The Girl and The Lake. These areas will provide you with a brief backgrounder on each project as well as their posters, including this brand new version for The Lake.


Sadly, no news on new productions, but there will be some coming shortly. We promise.

North Bay: An Industry Town?

There has been a great kerfuffle in North Bay of late, one that centres around the idea that this is an "ideal filming destination". While it is true that this past year has seen an unprecedented amount of productions filming in and around our fair city, I am not sure that everyone is seeing the big picture. North Bay has been used as a small town location in the Kids in The Hall: Death Comes to Town, Oliver Sherman (with the awesome Garret Dillahunt), and in some minds Running Mates (with Henry Winkler, although shot mostly in Burk's Falls), and a northern Production Company and Talent Agency did spill out of Dark Rising 2: Summer Strikes Back, and the accompanying miniseries that was shot in town (primarily on sets built in a warehouse). It is great to see our community embracing this new potential, but there are people worrying that dollar sign pupils are obscuring the vision of this new directive. It is fun and exciting to see famous people walking the streets of North Bay and relishing all we have to offer, but it is not necessarily a guarantee of a bright and prosperous new film industry future.

Death (and the Kids In The Hall) come to town = Fun! Exciting!

Film making is definitely a big-money industry, but it is also one filled with passion and vision. North Bay needs to maintain a clear line of sight and not get too far ahead of itself. Jim Calarco, who has always maintained a passion for the industry even when the glory and riches were not guaranteed, and his niece Brigitte Kingsley who brought the Dark Rising 2 production to town, realize the potential that our community holds and the need to build up the industry essentially from the ground up. That is the kind of vision that North Bay needs. It is great that we have experienced success over the past year, but the film industry is a fickle mistress.

I know this not through experience, but from general knowledge. The beauty of no-budget film making is that there are no stakes and nobody to answer to really but ourselves. For our team, the process is about passion and artistic gratification more than anything. The best reward isn't awards, or even nominations; it is the satisfaction that comes from seeing a few ideas on a page turn into a solid finished product after so much hard work.

I want to see North Bay succeed with its film aspirations. I want a thriving community to grow. When we launched About The Girl out into the world, most of the feedback we received was about the dynamic presentation and great locations. I wrote that script based around those specific locations with a full appreciation of what each location offered. North Bay has those locations, and so many more to offer, but we need to maintain realistic expectations.For the industry, the tax incentives are great, but when the expenses involved in importing qualified personnel outweigh the financial benefits of filming in the north, this perceived money train will find a new station.

About The Girl was never destined for Cannes, but one of our future projects might be. It will just take a bit of time before we have refined our process to that point. I hope that our passionate and committed film community, as well as our civic leaders and champions, can maintain a similar outlook.

Let's make it work!

ADDENDUM: There have been other films produced in North Bay and surrounding area including Captain of the Clouds, That Beautiful Somewhere, Grey Owl and more - but this really has been a good year hasn't?

Reason #10,043,604 for Vimeo

So... I've posted links to our first film, About The Girl, in the past so that everyone has a chance to check it out. This evening, I retooled the Internets in the favour of our humble (sorry) production company and we now have our very own page on Vimeo. It currently features... wait for it... About The Girl! Cool, no? Rest assured, we will be updating it soon with additional fun and films but for now it is a good start.

As an aside, I would like to mention that while I have always been a great online spectator, I am actually starting to feel like a participant now. For those who may not be aware, Somerset Productions, and through that yours truly, can now be found at:

Vimeo Home Page
Facebook (Personal Profile)
Facebook (Somerset Productions Group)
Twitter (Mostly Somerset, via me)
About The Girl on Vimeo

Part of this new digital life, especially through Facebook, means a greater ease of communication. In the case of Twitter, it also means accessibility, in particular to people who I have always admired like Roger Ebert...

Check out my latest Tweet:


Technology can be a very helpful tool. Through it, I have now been able to reach out to a person who shares his love and appreciation of film with the world (and has inspired my own), to share a link to a film I might not otherwise have made. That's pretty cool no matter how you look at it. I hope he watches it, and I hope to send him more in the future. It's not much, but it is the best way I can think of to thank him for what he has done for the film industry, film makers, and amateur dreamers like myself over the years.

Thanks for everything Roger!

Clearing Up Confusion of "Coat Tail" Conundrum

I've always assumed that Somerset Productions is a model based around teamwork. We all work together to achieve our film making goals. With About The Girl in particular, it was extremely difficult to distinguish between people's specific duties and roles: there were actors, and producers, and directors, and shooters, but there was also an overlap to everything we did. Scan through the credits and you will quickly see the number of repeated names throughout. Any 'official' titles have been more token assignments to identify the perceived roles of film.

I've been joking about our nominations yesterday - about riding coat tails, or being the handsome face that gets our cinematography noticed, or about sending condolences to me as the one person not nominated. A few people have now mentioned that they were sorry to hear I was shut out.

The thing is, in my mind, I wasn't. Our movie is nominated for another pair of awards and for that I am grateful. It is a great accomplishment and I really do see it as the success of our team being acknowledged. We are in this together and while I definitely surround myself with talented people, it is a conscious choice. I want to create the best possible versions of my stories and Kevin and Pat are the guys I turn to most often to make that happen. Ed was a part of that equation to while we were still working together.

With these nominations, you can all rest assured that I am as excited for our team as I would be if I was nominated myself... That is the way you need to be in the world of no-budget film making. You are part of a team and part of a process that is about collaboration, team work, and shared success.

I'm proud to be part of this team and I am hoping that we continue to grow, develop and succeed with our productions. At the end of the day, we do it for the thrill and the art. Don't get me wrong, awards are nice, but they are nice because they reinforce the fact that we are doing what we set out to do in the first place. More to the point, we are doing it well and that's the best reward...

2 Weeks and 2 Days Later...

It's been too long since my last post, and for that I apologize. There are no excuses really, besides a handful of writing projects, a strange obsession with all things Olympics, and the requisite daily grind.

I've also been spending far too much time trying to figure out how to shoot something in Cuba when I am there and what I should be shooting. I have a few ideas drifting trough the mental quagmire, but so far, nothing concrete. More vexing than an idea (which granted can probably wait for a bit) is figuring out what I can use to shoot. I need something affordable, portable, and easy-to-use on the fly. Any suggestions? I'm leaning towards the ultra tiny Canon SX200 at the moment. It seems like a good bet.

All of this of course has lead me to a whimsical nostalgia for the trouble shooting process of all our shoots. I've mentioned weather, equipment, schedules and more in the past, but ideas are one thing that I didn't mention. I have a few in the hopper right now, and a few scripts ready to go, and I am hoping that very soon, there will be a new update. In the meantime, some nostalgic shots of the process of bringing About The Girl to fruition. Still an achievement that I am extremely proud of...

I'll be in touch again soon. With some news. About ideas...

You Need To Start Somewhere.

Every company needs to have a beginning. Ours wasn't really in film, but we have received the most feedback from our ventures into that arena so far.

Our About The Girl Poster

This is just a refresher for anyone new to the program... Somerset Productions started out in the print media arena before venturing into film. Our first short was called "About The Girl", lovingly shot by Ed Regan; directed by Kevin Hoffman; written by yours truly; and starring anyone I knew who didn't mind donating way more time than they originally agreed to. For a first-time experiment, it proved to be quite successful and won a handful of awards and recognitions and was very nearly featured on The Border, Canada's most successful hour-long drama. That last bit might very well still happen. Our film is available online at the National Screen institute of Canada, but for those of you outside of Canada, I provide the following link to Ed Regan's Vimeo account . I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks again for your support and I'll look forward to providing you with more updates, and hopefully some very exciting news, in the next couple days. Until then...

Music To Your...Eyes

When a film starts coming together, and the various snippets of dialogue slowly fuse into a story thanks to judicious editing and the use of those labour-intensive multiple angles, it is truly a thing of beauty. Really, it's not unlike seeing the pieces of a puzzle slowly form into that big picture you know is there.

When a rough scene is finished, it is exhilarating. With About The Girl, each new scene brought a renewed interest to the process and inspired us to keep working through the often tedious editing process. Uploading footage, from all those different angles we captured, took a great deal of time. Stringing it all together, even more. Still, with each new scene, we were closer to our goal. We were happy with our progress, but there was something missing.

We were missing music. As a quick patch solution, we added some temp tracks added into the scenes, stuff that we had lying around in iTunes, and they finally started clicking the way we had imagined. The problem was, using popular music can be a very costly endeavor and this was no-budget film making.

When I first sat down to write About The Girl, even in the early noir version, the opening scene was always the same slow reveal of a beautiful dead girl in a creek. I had a song in mind for that scene and I decided to rekindle an old friendship to see if it might work. In the end, my good friend Mark Bradford was happy to supply not only Pete's Dam, the song that I had envisioned for that opening scene, but also a full soundtrack to our film under the guise of his recording name punch me hard. Do yourself a favour and visit that link.

The planning process is tiring work
Mark Bradford, and sometime collaborator Jeff Addison

There is no denying that the music of punch me hard resulted in a more powerful story than even I had imagined. A perfect example is the final scene, as the three weary friends walk out to the bridge and read the note. We had a song in place, one that had become inextricably linked to the scene thanks to repeat viewings and refinements to the scene, but when we replaced it with happy new year, Mark's punch me hard effort, something surprising happened. The scene suddenly felt complete. Mark's beautiful song increased the melancholy, beauty, and perhaps most surprisingly, the hope of our closing scene. Hope was not something we had envisioned for the closing moments of our film, but thanks to Mark's incredible talents, we realized that hope was something that had always been there: it just needed the right cue to make itself known.

Music can change your life, and it can change your movie too. Many of the scenes that we had grown accustomed to with temp tracks, took on subtle new characteristics and sometimes, a refined emotional resonance with Mark's input. I have always respected Mark as a musician and a friend, and that is more true than ever after collaborating with him on our first film. Mark's music provided our film with a strong thematic through line and served to reinforce not just the action on screen, but the emotional journey our characters had taken. I look forward to working with him again in the future. He is a talented musician first and foremost, but he also provided us with the perfect direction as to how his songs should be incorporated. That is a totally different skill set. Collaboration is the key to success for no-budget film making and if this is something you are going to attempt, you should make sure you surround yourself with talented artists. It will make your experience all the more pleasant.

You should really take a minute to visit the link above and check out some ofthe music on the punch me hard site, including Happy New Year, which closed out our film. You'll be glad you did.

Next time: How to premiere your movie (unofficially), with no-budget.

BTS - Making Bad Into Good

You know those behind the scenes features on DVDs where you get all that cool insight into the process of making a film and how much work it can be? Consider this our first behind the scenes feature - in written form.

When we were shooting About The Girl, we encountered a challenges and setbacks that could have threatened to derail the entire project. For starters, our first day of shooting was in early September, a time of year where the days are generally warm, and the evenings cool. We were shooting some "summer" footage and planned to hold off a bit to capture some great fall colours for the primary outdoor scenes, but we soon realized that shooting a no-budget film was a rather time consuming endeavor. Any number of factors can affect your production, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. He are a few of the bigger obstacles we had to deal with...

1. Scheduling Life
Favours were called in and a cast and crew formed with everyone generously participating on a voluntary basis. This meant that a wide range of work and familial obligations had to be factored into our shooting schedule. There were many late starts, few rehearsals, and fortunately only one day-long hangover that resulted in a last minute recast of a major speaking role on the day of shooting, and subsequently some last minute "summer" re-shoots in early November.

2. Water Temperatures
In the opening scene, the camera slowly pans across an ominous structure, slowly drifting down to a dramatic final reveal: a pale redhead lying face down in the coppery waters of a slow-flowing river beneath a train trestle. We filmed the shot a dozen times but wound up using the first take, the only one where our corpse wasn't shivering too violently to be convincingly dead. It worked out beautifully, thanks to the stalwart dedication of our "dead girl". She was a trooper through and through.

Rebuilding the audio in studio
Michael Humble and Ed Regan

3. Bad Audio
We spent a cold October afternoon huddled underneath a dripping bridge, struggling to get the words to spill forth from our chattering teeth. It was a fantastic location, but on that particular day, it was like being in a wind tunnel, assailed by a constant barrage of icy rain pellets that were driven in sideways on the gusting winds off the lake. When we got back to the studio to review the footage, we soon realized that the only sounds our boom mic had picked up were the howling winds and the hollow clang of the microphone cord pinging off a metal support beam. Still, not many people realized that the voices, cars, flowing water, wind and cackling crows in that scene were all added in post.

4. Real World Locations
Sometimes a passing car or plane would drown out our shot, or people would walk around a corner and find themselves suddenly on camera. These were fairly easy issues to deal with compared to the evening we decided to shoot our dive bar scene in an actual dive bar with actual dive bar patrons in attendance. While the crew set up the dolly track and equipment, the two principal actors rehearsed their lines, including a scene where a brief skirmish erupts. Despite the congenial approach, the rehearsal was quickly broken up by the owner who didn't want any trouble and who was clearly confused when we explained that we were just practicing our lines. After sorting out the misconception, we started rolling cameras, but were shortly after interrupted when one of the patrons fell down the stairs on her way out and we had to break while the bar was flooded by the flashing red lights of the ambulance that had come to her rescue. Still, despite all the confusion, the background smoke coughers added a lived in feeling to the production, and they were very accommodating of the "movie people from New York". It was worth the extra time we invested in that scene, and just as well we didn't need re-shoots because the bar wound up closing the following day.

5. Inclement Weather
We arrived on set for our the last day of shooting, anxious to have the last scene in the bag, and surprised to find almost three inches of snow had fallen overnight. We were scheduled for a 10am start, and it was 1pm by the time we had shoveled, swept, and flooded the snow from the dock and reestablished our autumn time line. It was more work that we anticipated and by the end of the day, we were racing the setting sun to get our final shots. We did in the end though, and it couldn't have worked out better.

Adapting to change and last minute crises is part of the thrill of film making. We the shooting done, we settled into the editing suite and the hours bled into days, and eventually weeks and months. During that time, About The Girl slowly took form and after a quick pick-up shoot in the spring to smooth out a bumpy scene transition, we were ready to add the permanent soundtrack.

I'll tell you about that next time...

"Re-adjusting" the setting for our "autumn" shoot

Kevin Hoffman and Ed Regan

A Good Plan B Should Be Your Plan A

Like most things in life, it started with an idea. Instead of dead end novel attempts and overly ambitious life-swallowing comic book concepts we decided to change our approach - why not try something smaller, something a little more self-contained and collaborative? Why not try film?

About The Girl was our first project, a simple story of lost love with an investigative twist; a murder mystery that intentionally bordered on cliché and proved to be a much more ambitious undertaking than we had initially planned. Early drafts of the script leaned towards a film noir set in a small Northern Ontario town sensibility, a concept that proved to be conceptually appealing, but somewhat beyond our range as a starting point for what we were dubbing “our experiment in film”. And that really is what the film was to us, an experiment to see if we could bring together the people, technology, and artistry required to produce something that would not be a cringe-worthy and abject failure.

Keep it simple, was the request from Kevin Hoffman, our elected director. After nearly two weeks of back and forth deliberation about the merits of concept vs. the benefits of practicality (primarily conducted as an internal dialogue with myself), the script was completed – now re-purposed with 50% more simplified dialogue and a streamlined story. Attentive viewers will notice that a few of the initial noir elements remain in the script, mostly in the form of some of the more colourful wordplay. I think it makes for a nice everybody-wins compromise, and a handful of entertainingly awkward line deliveries.

Our First Day of Filming
Ed Regan and Michael Humble

With the shooting script finalized, we were ready to start filming and on a chilly evening in September of 2007, we filled a small apartment bathroom with lights, cameras and the slightest hint of action – and were hooked right away. The first scene we filmed was a pensive bathroom mirror scene, a last-minute addition to the shooting script that was designed to create an added layer of intrigue in the story. It was a small scene, but a perfect test of everyone’s mettle, from the acting, to the direction and technical aspects of film. We spent the better part of an hour rigging up light reflector panels; angling and repositioning lights; testing sound levels and ambient noise; and setting up a simple yet dynamic shot. It was not an overly exciting process, and it took an insanely long time to capture the ten seconds of footage that appeared in the final scene, but it was exhilarating, methodical, thrilling and above all immensely satisfying.

Everything exploded from there and we spent the next several weeks jumping from location to location; shooting and re-shooting scenes; uploading, reviewing and editing footage; and planning our shoots days in advance to ensure that we were able to cover all the angles. Having multiple speaking parts and a single camera to shoot with meant that even the simplest scenes required multiple takes to get all the coverage and multiple angles we would need to build a dynamic scene. Our baptism into film was never destined to be a smooth procedure and we hit a number of bumps along the way. Here’s the thing though, each time we did hit a bump we came up with a quick and effective Plan B.

Here is my first piece of advice to any budding film makers in the audience today. If making movies is something you think you would like to do, make sure you plan everything in advance and know that your plans most likely won’t play out the way you anticipated.

Inclement weather, technical issues, wayward cast members, medical emergencies… There are any number and combination of things that can and will get in the way. I would even say that you would be wise to make sure you have a Plan B… for your Plan B. Improvising is a great skill to have in film: it can be used by actors to build a better scene and rapport, and it can also be used to achieve equally wonderful results by directors, cinematographers, producers, editors and writers.

This post seems to have turned a little educational – I’m still figuring out the voice. Next time I promise more laughs, more explosions, and some dramatic insight into some of the many insane things that nearly kept us from finishing About The Girl. Again, comments and feedback are always encouraged. Thanks for tuning in!

Welcome to Somerset...

Greetings Voracious Fandom,

Yes, like our embracing of film as a medium for creative expression, so too has it taken us a while to embrace the inherent virtues of blogdom. We may be slow to adapt, and slower still to figure out what it is we are doing, but we are here and we hope to maintain this presence for your sake (or at the very least our own amusement). You are our dedicated fandom (hi mum, hello dad) and it is the least we could do for you.

We've had a great run so far, from finishing a whole issue of The Gloaming (in full colour at that!) to our first handful of short films being produced shipped and somehow accepted to a handful of fairly prestigious festivals. Our first filmed effort About The Girl, managed to surpass its nerve-jangled origins to win a handful of nominations, recognitions and even a couple of awards. We were also approached by the producers of a program on a major Canadian broadcast network (cough, The Border, cough, cough) to feature our program in the background of theirs. Not bad for a first attempt.

Shooting The Lake...in the lake
Zachary Govis, Patrick Gilbert, Kevin Hoffman, and Sam Lafond

Our most recent project started out smaller and simpler than About The Girl, a down and dirty shoot that was meant to be over in day, or maybe two if the pull focus wasn't clicking. Of course, good intentions for a speedy shoot always end up in flashback scenes set in the '50s. Not so fast and dirty after all, but there is good news. After some behind-the-scenes reshuffling, we completed The Lake, and the end result is a rather beautiful testament to the enduring power of love - or was it an enduring testament to a crotchety old man (beautifully assayed by Mr. Bob Clout) and the aloof youth he torments for sport? Either way, we are all very proud of our efforts with The Lake and were thrilled when we were notified we had once again been accepted into the annual National Screen Institute of Canada Online Film Festival.

We should be featured in early February so make sure you check back. I'll post the link when it becomes official. Until then, thanks for tuning in, thanks for the support, and thanks for making sure to come back often for more scintillating insights from Somerset Productions! Up next: a brief behind-the-scenes history of our first production About The Girl. I know, it's exciting!