OSHAWA -- In the short film The World’s Most Fabulous Object, two childhood friends who became romantically involved, embark on a road trip to salvage their friendship after a bad breakup.
Relationship troubles are something director Bruce Harper, born in Oshawa, and his writing partner, Ian Malone, know about first hand.
“Parts of the relationship and definitely just the motivations of the characters were kind of autobiographical,” Mr. Harper says of the film. “I had gone through a big breakup before film school and my writing partner had just broken up with his long-term, high school girlfriend. So we got to work all that out in the movie.”
The film and its tale of friendship have already enchanted audiences at the Anchorage Film Festival and the Toronto Student Shorts Festival, where it was awarded People’s Choice award. Next up, the film will be included in The Future Frames program of the 2008 Sprockets International Film Festival for Children, held April 12-18 in Toronto.
The Future Frames program was created to showcase upcoming talent from post-secondary schools across Canada, something Mr. Harper, who shot the film as part of his third-year courses at Sheridan College, has some advice about.
“All those big filmmakers who never went to film school, I thought I could do that,” he said. “I didn’t go to film school to be taught, I went to meet like-minded people and people who work in the business. In that sense, I would highly recommend film school. But don’t expect them to teach you, you have to teach yourself. Basically you show up at film school and they have everything you need to make a movie, so make some movies.”
For now Mr. Harper is working on developing new ideas with his production partner, Sarah Bowles, and says he would like to try out many different genres.
“I’m not sure what genre I should do next but I definitely want to try out everything,” he says. “I’ll just paddle around in the world of movies and figure out which path is better for me. I need to dabble a little more.”
One genre he’s already familiar with is the war movie. In his second year of film school, Mr. Harper used the Second World War as a backdrop for another short film, A Lucky Strike, which focused on a soldier in a slit trench along the Holland-German border in the dead of winter. He desperately needs a cigarette.
Mr. Harper said the filming of A Lucky Strike was a great learning experience and really informed his later experience filming The World’s Most Fabulous Object.
As for the success of Object, which swept Sheridan’s school media awards, Mr. Harper says he’s been surprised at how much the acclaim has affected him.
“It’s cool, it’s really fulfilling,” he says. “I gotta tell you it feels so good when people clap at the end of your movie or laugh at the funny parts. And people clap at the end of every movie at a film festival by default so it shouldn’t matter, but it does anyway. And it took me by surprise, not that people clapped, but that it affected me, that my emotions were running so high when my movies were being screened.”
For more information on the Sprockets International Film Festival for Children or to purchase tickets visit www.sprockets.ca.