Slate of Projects

I’ve been working on getting organized since I moved into my new studio space and decided it was a good opportunity to let you all know what I’m working on now. I always have a million projects I’m trying to get off the ground, so keeping things realistic is something I need to constantly keep in check.

Film

I have two film projects I’m trying to write currently, hopefully to be produced next year. The first is a continuation of the Things You Can’t Forget series, entitled Intimacy. It’s the story of a couple on vacation and explores, through their friendships with people outside of their relationship, where true intimacy lies. The second film, entitled Houndstooth / Nom d’un chien!, is a short comedy based on an urban legend I took for the truth recently. It’s a fun story that I’m currently trying to see if I can work some other ideas into without diluting it’s simplicity.

I’m also going to be wading into the footage me and my crew, the Five Wise Kids, shot this summer in Jamaica, trying to shape a short doc out of it, hopefully. This has been on the back burner for a while, clearly, since I’ve been back since the beginning of July, but I’m feeling guilty and that’s a great motivator. I think there’s some great footage in there and I have a concept for the story, so we’ll see what I can get out of the footage.

Web

Speaking of Things You Can’t Forget, I’m going to be vamping up that website quite a bit sometime soon to make it a proper showcase for the films in the series and hopefully a fun destination for news on productions, screenings and anything else that comes up. Aside from that, I’m working on rebranding my father’s company website, Hydropower Performance Engineering Inc. (HPPE), with a greener focus and a simple, engaging design. A new logo is in the works and I’ll be heading out in the field with my dad in a few weeks to take some photos of him at work, the hydroelectric generating station and his equipment. There are a few other sites I think I’ll be tackling soon as well, mainly from a design capacity, nothing confirmed yet, though.

The other major project, which is the establishing project of (hopefully) a series of fun and useful web applications, is the tiffr project. tiffr is a small web application that will simplify and streamline the normally arduous process of selecting and scheduling films for the Toronto International Film Festival. It will allow users to easily make a shortlist of films screening in the festival and to create a schedule based on their own criteria. I started working on this with Ryan Ming earlier this year, but when we weren’t ready for TIFF08, we decided to step back and retool our idea. Our new architecture will be more flexible and easier to use and develop than our previous model. I hope to begin the development phase very soon and potentially have a beta version online by the end of February for testing. Stay tuned for news on this.

Photo

Aside from the shoot I’m planning at the hydroelectric dam, I don’t have any real photo projects on the go right now, other than the monumental task of sorting and ranking my entire existing catalog of images. To that end, I’m hoping to soon make an attempt at posting an image daily to my flickr account, but we’ll see how that works. Maybe just a couple a week. I’m already making excuses.

So, yeah, there’s a lot on the go. Keep checking back for updates on these and other projects, and hopefully, together, we’ll see some progress.