Evren Boisjoli wins 24-Hour Film Race

Evren Boisjoli 2008 and his Concordia film team recently won first place in the Montreal 24-Hour Film Race.

The Film Race is a competition that challenges young filmmakers to write and produce a four-minute film based on certain plot guidelines—all within 24 hours.

The competition is held each year in 23 cities in North America. Twenty-two films were entered in this year’s Montreal race. Evren and the seven-member H.264 team gathered on a weekend in early October to try their hand at this cinematic challenge.

Their story plays out like this: On Friday at 10 p.m. the team members receive a cryptic email. Each city uses a unique theme that the film producers must follow. The email says that the Montreal theme is to be “curiosity” with a surprise element: “soap”.

They immediately jump into an hour-long brainstorming session to come up with a plot that uses the dictated elements. The story line is sketched out and at 1 a.m. the first scene is shot in Evren’s parents’ bedroom while the main writer continues fleshing out the rest of the script.

Armed only with two Canon 7D cameras, a couple of basic lenses, a recorder and a boom microphone, the whole crew then shifts into high gear, driving to four locations and shooting continuously through the night until 8 a.m. They had to improvise lighting, shooting outdoor scenes using car headlights and streetlamps.

At 8 a.m. the crew grabs some sleep while their digital film downloads into the computer. From 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. they edit the film. Evren jumps into a speedy car and races to the drop-off point, making it with only eight minutes to go.

The finished film, Seife, is a dark tale based on an apocryphal story of soap having been made from the physical remains of Holocaust victims. “The last 15 seconds are very intense,” Evren divulges. “The soap becomes a character.”

At the awards ceremony on November 3, a screening of the film is greeted with a smattering of applause that grows into an ovation. George Mihalka, director of My Bloody Valentine, presents the award.

Still pumped from the experience, the crew is planning to enter the upcoming 100-Hour Film Race. Meanwhile, Seife moves on to the Grand Prix competition in New York City. The crew is hoping their four-minute film might be re-shot with a larger schedule and budget, to compete in other film festivals.

The film is co-directed by Evren, Randy Smith and Martin Goudron. All seven members of Evren’s “guerilla film” team attend Concordia. Three are enrolled in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema; the others in the School of Communications. Before this, Evren studied film at Dawson, but he really got his start at Selwyn House in Grade 9 with teacher Bill Bedard.

“Film was somewhere I could really shine,” Evren recalls. “It gave me an opportunity to acquire leadership skills and learn to work with my peers as a team.

“Mr. Bedard was a huge influence. He gave us a lot of slack, but not so much that we could kill ourselves.

“His way of teaching helped me become the film student I am today.”

Evren says he now realizes that the Selwyn House Media Studies program is on par with film courses being offered at the university level.

To view Seife, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgPeeICrpS4