Miramichiers take home top prizes at Silver Wave Film Fest
Published Friday November 21st, 2008
It was a big night for a couple of Miramichi moviemakers Saturday night.
The Silver Wave Film Festival in Fredericton last weekend showcased homegrown New Brunswick films — and the big winner of the annual awards show was Gamers' Manifesto — co-directed and co-produced by Chris Fulton, who currently resides in Newcastle, along with Josh Linton of Fredericton.
Fulton, who is, coincidentally, my main squeeze, wrote Gamers' Manifesto about two video-gaming geeks and the girl who threatens to come between them.
The film took Best NB Comedy — a feat Fulton said he didn't dare dream of.
For winning, Fulton and Linton took home a $500 check.
They split the Service Award with the winner for Best Drama, Bunthivy Nou, for A Lion's Tale.
The Service Award is a $2500 grant for a future next project.
"I was trying to diffuse my expectations," he said. "Josh called me and said he had a really good feeling, but I said — I don't know. We shouldn't get our hopes up."
Fulton said as proud as he was of what they had all accomplished he was worried the jury might not get the very specific gaming humour — like, "How could you donkey kong a friend like this" or one of my personal favourites, "I'm powering up our avatars while you're out there doing Luigi knows what with Yoshi knows who."
But as he sat in the audience watching his work on the big screen for the first time with a packed-in audience, he felt reassured.
"I was listening for the laugh density," he said. "I was listening for the little titters from the audience when they got the gaming jokes and I was listening for the spontaneous belly laughs for the slapstick humour and it felt good to get both."
He started to feel even better about the night as the presenters announced the first couple of awards.
The first nomination and win of the night went to fellow Miramichier Jordan Roherty who created the score for Gamers' — the scenes perfectly punctuated by an 8-bit Nintendo-esque soundtrack.
"I started to get my hopes up when Jordan won," said Fulton.
Working with Roherty turned out to be a bit of a surprise. The two were "simpatico" — they were able to easily play ideas off each other.
"As soon as I mentioned I was looking for an 8-bit score Jordan wrote me back in an e-mail that said, ‘you don't know how happy you've made me.' And he really delivered."
"Roherty did his fair share of research to prepare to compose such an unusual score.
As far as the process, I actually went back and critically listened to some of my favourite music from old video games, and took much inspiration from there. For instance, the piece I wrote for the Legend of Zelda montage was made to sound like it could have come directly from the original game, hopefully bringing the viewer back to when they may have played it, long ago. Of course, I made sure my actual music was original."
"I was happy to have the opportunity to score a film in a totally different way than I ever have before."
He looked genuinely shocked as he approached the Silverwave stage to accept his plaque Saturday night.
"Going in, I thought the night could go either way. With my music sounding the way it did, I was curious as to whether or not it would be understood. My head was swimming when they called my name, and I'm glad that my family was there to see it."
And the night continued to bring accolades to the crew of Gamers' — winning Excellence in Art Direction and Excellence in Editing.
As part of the crew I saw first hand the hard work everyone put into the project — from the the pre-production work of Linton prepping the set full of nostalgic action figures and movie posters — to the post-production work including Jason Chisolm's artful editing.
As exciting as the win was for everyone involved both Fulton and Roherty see it as a stepping stone to more opportunities in the movie making biz.
"Currently, I'm working on finishing my website, so that people can go online and actually hear some of the things I've done," said Roherty. "I'm also attempting to get my audio post-production business off the ground, focusing not just on music composition, but also sound editing and sound design. Hopefully this experience will help me out in that venture."
As for Fulton, he and Linton aren't sure yet what the next project will be, but they are thrilled to think, whatever it is it will have not only some clout but a nice chunk of change behind it.
"I have a few writing projects I'm working on right now," said Fulton. "We are talking about working on something with Bun [Best Drama winner] — that way we don't have to split the prize money. It will stretch quite a bit further that way."
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