FILM ON THE FLY

This year’s Fly films are studded with Seattle’s most dynamic directors

Lynn Shelton in Moving.

This year’s Fly Filmmaking Challenge at SIFF presented some new challenges for 4 local filmmakers working on 3 short films in 3 weeks. Every year the challenge switches up the rules; among the requirements this year was to use one of two local SAG actors, Basil Harris (My Effortless Brilliance, We Go Way Back) or Abby Dylan (appeared in all 3 Fly films in 2005).

That actor Harris has appeared in both of local director Lynn Shelton’s acclaimed feature films seems like a coup for Shelton, especially considering that she herself is cast in the starring role of one of this year’s films, Moving by Megan Griffith.

“With the short time period provided for writing, I made the decision to write for people I already knew and who I wanted to work with,” Griffiths says. “Lynn is someone I know well and I knew she had an acting background—she had auditioned for my feature film The Off Hours and really blown me away. So I created the role for her and luckily she was available to do it.”

Moving follows the story of a woman packing to move cross-country, when her plans fall apart. “I knew that I had very little time to prepare the space that I’d be shooting in, which was an empty living room,” Griffiths says. “So I thought a good work-around for having a bare space would be to have one of the characters be moving.”

Since she had no time for casting calls, Griffiths says she developed all the characters in the film for specific local actors, and built the story around the relationships that she imagined the individuals might have if put in a situation together.

Griffiths is known for a long history working in local film, working as first assistant director for what seems like a rolodex of the Seattle scene’s most important projects, including films like The Spy and the Sparrow, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, True Adolescents, Butterfly Dreaming, Cthulhu, Zoo, and We Go Way Back. She is in the midst of fundraising for her own feature, The Off Hours, which will star Aidan Quinn and Alicia Silverstone.

Other Fly filmmakers this year include the team of Joe Shapiro and Andy McCone, whose film Shut Eye examines a man suffering from the rare disease Fatal Familial Insomnia, literally dying from lack of sleep. Shapiro is known locally as the editor for Police Beat and Zoo, working with the writer/director team of Charles Mudede and Rob Devor. McCone is an actor and director in a number of local shorts.

Rob Cunningham, the final Fly filmmaker, had his short Gustav Braustache and the Auto-Debilitator featured in the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Festival in 2007. His Fly film, End Zone, depicts a chess showdown between a robot and Death.

This year SIFF has also commissioned director Cheryl Slean to make Creativity in Context, a short documentary about the Fly filmmaking process. Slean was the winner of the IFP/Spotlight Award in 2005, with which she made the short film Diggers. That film has screened at festivals worldwide and is featured on the DVD Seattle Women in Film.“The whole process was pretty magical actually,” Griffiths concludes. “I can’t wait to see the other teams’ projects—from what I’ve heard it seems like it will be a really good year for the Fly’s.”