"Simplicity" Quicktime Coming Soon

With "A Kiss Remembered" supplying ISM with the experience of pulling together a filmmaking workshop, we decided it was time to pull out all the stops.

On "A Kiss Remembered" we had the bare minimum in every department. Our lighting kit was almost nothing and we shot 80% of the film without anything but a camera, microphone, and the actors, very similar to all of the student projects turned into ISM. You can do this on digital video but its not recommended. The subject matter really allowed for us to let it not be perfectly exposed and beautiful.

"Simplicity" was going to be a completely different beast altogether. It was time to bring in the troops and really make these workshops something to remember. Where "A Kiss Remembered" was filmed on Mini DV, "Simplicity" would be shot in beautiful 35mm film. Many more professional filmmakers, teachers and students would be brought together to complete the project.

When shooting film you have to have special equipment to make sure the exposure of the film is correct. This equipment is very expensive to rent and even more expensive to buy. If you want your project to look beautiful then you've got to have some lights and grip equipment, that's where the magic is. Over the years of working in the film industry Chet Thomas had formed a great many friendships that assisted us in getting just about anything we wanted.

Along with all this equipment we now had a much higher number of people wanting to participate, both teacher/student and filmmaker alike, which was lucky because we really needed all of them.

Chet Thomas would sit in the director's chair on "Simplicity," and with Rob Verderay and Brian Hennessy at his side, managed to do the nearly impossible.

Tristan Whitman would also join the ISM workshop team as the director of photography and would later continue on the crews of all the other ISM workshops.

Having just wrapped on Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report," Chet managed to grab a lot of people from that crew and drag them over to Universal Studios where we would be filming "Simplicity." They didn't have any idea what they would be doing and in fact most thought they were just helping Chet out with a personal project. They would soon find out it was a whole lot more than that.