Toby & Hettie's Blog

Welcome to our blog for our films and our life in film, but at the moment specifically for our latest film L’amour de Montparnasse.  It’s our second major short film that we worked on together.  Toby as writer/director and myself as producer.  Our first film Alone about the Universe is 18 minutes and a sci-fi drama.  It was our first film that we sent off to festivals and at the time we were very new to the whole circuit so had no plan or strategy.  We picked up two international awards for best short and excellence in filmmaking which was so surprising, we really didn’t think we’d go anywhere!

www.lamour-de-montparnasse.com

Anyway, our second short has been submitted into about 15 film festivals internationally so far that are happening over the next year, some of the announcement dates are even as far away as next April!  Lots of waiting ahead of us!  However, this time we are a bit better prepared.  We have a website with set photos, biographies of us and the actors, posters, and a trailer!  It is a very low-budget short film of 9 minutes however everybody believes it to have cost a lot more than it did because we have an amazing friend who is also our Director of Photography, Roberto Ricci.

So how did this movie come about…we were running in Griffith Park one morning and had parked our car near the stables.  On our return we noticed that there were a group of people going into what looked like a fenced in park so we decided to go and take a look.  Having been in LA for two years and visiting Griffith Park fairly often it was amazing that we’d never been to Travel Town, a train museum!  They had several huge old steamers on rails with different types of carriages attached and even platforms and a station like cover to protect the trains.  Toby as usual came up with an idea there and then for a short film.  Over the next couple of days we developed the idea which became a 6 page script.  The idea was to shoot a scene that had a lot of back story and was as if it had been taken from a feature length film.  We contacted travel town, film LA and all our friends and had a meeting.  Two casting sessions, 4 rehersals and 10 days later we were at the Travel Town museum at 4:30pm with 20 cast&crew members, a 24′ grip truck and a car full of coffee and food we waited for Travel Town to close to the public and open to the night shoot that we were going to do.

The making of the movie in our next blog entry…..

Toby&Hettie

Tags: actor, best short film, blog, cast, dubai, film festival, filmmaker, funny, hettie fuller, life, los angeles, low budget, movie, new york, photographer, poster, producer, red one, robert ricci, short film, story, toby lomas, website, writer