In early October, I heard an advertisement on 95.1 radio station about the First Annual Wasaga Beach Short Film Festival.  Wasaga Beach is a neighbouring community to Collingwood (our weekend retreat) and a common beach/resort destination from Toronto (just 1.5 hour drive).  When I was in high school, we would often drive up for the day and sometimes camp nearby.  And when my sons graduated from high school, they came up in droves to rent cabins at Wasaga and celebrate.

As an amateur photographer and videographer, I was intrigued by the opportunity to produce a video for this competition but also conscious of the fact that the entries were due in two weeks.  I originally planned to develop a short film, working together with some others in my family.  There are 5 categories for entries – Romance, Action, Documentary, and Comedy (all 4 to 8 minutes in length) with the fifth category being a 30 second advertisement for Wasaga Beach.  Following the release of my novel, “Vision Speak”, I’ve been exploring how to tell stories using other media, or perhaps mixed media with my writing, so this seemed like a nice chance to experiment with video production.

It came down to the weekend before the entries were due, Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend, which was unbelievably hot for mid-October in my area of the world.  It was hot enough to go to the beach, swim, and shoot some film.  With such limited time, we ended up just submitting one video in the Ad category.  There just wasn’t enough time to produce a longer film for this first event.

Since then we are among the finalists and the Film Festival has placed all the final videos on Youtube.  The Gala event/Award ceremony is on January 21st in Wasaga Beach, however, we will be in Austria for the Youth Olympic Games to watch our niece compete for Canada in Alpine Skiing at that time.  So, our sons who participated in this production will go to the event and hopefully collect our prize. 🙂

Here is our video, entitled “Share the Magic at Wasaga”: