After years of sitting in her room pounding the keyboard, Semi Chellas’ words and visions come to life for the first time and all at once.

The Accent Entertainment/ Temple Street Productions mow Lost Aviators (working title) for the cbc and Showtime marks the young Toronto writer’s first foray into television. And with The Life Before This, produced by Ilana Frank’s new prodco Thump, she makes her premiere on the big screen.

Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, The Life Before This, shot on Toronto locations from mid-October to Nov. 19 for just under $3 million, began to take shape around three years ago following a casual discussion between the producer and director.

After a tragic Toronto coffee shop shooting, Frank felt inspired to humanize the statistics of people killed in random acts of violence and set the wheels in motion on the film addressing the subject.

‘We were talking about how the person who was murdered didn’t know she was going to be dead in 10 hours just from going for a piece of cake,’ says Ciccoritti. ‘We thought about all the interesting decisions we make in our lives; if you turn left instead of right things might have gone a different way, and we thought that subject would be interesting for a movie.’

While inquiring about a writer to conceptualize the idea, Frank was introduced to Chellas, a Canadian Film School graduate, and after months of brainstorming sessions to give the story structure, Chellas began on the first draft.

The Life Before This, lensed by Norayr Kasper, follows seven separate stories and starts at the end with a teacher grading papers, a 13-year-old girl (his student), a couple on a first date, an exterminator, a lawyer and the waitress in a cafe at twilight.

After holding up a casino and being trapped by the police, two men enter the coffee shop. Shots are fired and four people lie dead on the floor. . . Fade out.

The next shot fades in at 7 a.m. of the same day and follows the 12 hours leading up to the tragedy.

In the early stages of discussions with worldwide distributor Alliance, Frank says Alliance made it clear that although it was an ensemble piece it should have some name value.

‘It was a good news, bad news thing,’ explains Frank. ‘We didn’t have a leading role to attract names yet we did have really quirky and interesting characters who only had to be available for a short period of time so it wouldn’t interfere with their lives.’

The talent includes Stephen Rea, Catherine O’Hara, Joe Pantoliano, David Hewlett, Emily Hamphire, Jennifer Dale, Leslie Hope, and Callum Keith Rennie.

After working with Sarah Polley and Jacob Tierney on Straight Up, Ciccoritti wanted them for the roles of Connie and Justin, a young couple facing adversity as they make the move to live together. According to the director, the two have a certain chemistry and really are the characters, so ‘there is almost no acting involved.’

Week three of the shoot finds the two young actors on location in a messy loft. Cardboard boxes litter the center of the room, clothes are draped over the couch and Connie sulks on the floor, rifling mindlessly through a plastic box. The tension is thick as they argue about whether she is ready for the big move.

Since the movie is about the accidental things that happen to define life, Ciccoritti is going for a natural visual and acting style, suppressing any attempts by cast at being ‘actorish.’

‘In fact,’ he jokes, ‘my goal is to send every actor away at the end of the day feeling like they have done a bad job, so it feels casual and the visual imagery is light and gossamer to suggest the idea that life can’t be defined but is full of infinite possibilities, that anything can happen.’

When the camera started rolling on The Life Before This, Chellas was still two weeks away from wrapping Lost Aviators, which was shooting outside the city, and divided her time between the two.

Lost Aviators, a $4.5-million mow directed by David Wellington and produced by Susan Cavan for Accent and Patrick Whitley for Temple Street, was lensed by Andre Pienaar from the end of September to the beginning of November in Markham, Uxbrige and Guelph, Ont.

It’s a family story about a 13-year-old girl, Katie Penhallow, who while visiting her grandmother in Porters Point, Nfld. wanders away one night and comes across the ghosts of two legendary French aviators from 70 years earlier. Still trying to deal with the death of her test pilot father, the young girl tries to help the ghosts with their journey.

Although the story is fictitious, it is based on actual pilots who in 1927 attempted to cross the Atlantic in a single-engine plane and were never heard from again.

Catherine May, executive story editor, first heard the idea when young Newfoundland writer Gail Collins pitched it at a 1995 cfc pitch session. May introduced the concept to Cavan, who optioned it and together with Collins developed an outline.

Meanwhile, the aspiring Chellas was honing her writing skills on other projects when her agent presented and impressed the producer with some of her earlier short stories.

As far as nailing down a director, Wellington’s feature film sensibilities made him a first choice for everyone, according to Cavan, who calls him one of the most talented directors working in the country.

Playing the lead role is Juliana Wimbles, the result of a Canada-wide search for a young lady who could carry a movie. Marsha Mason is her grandmother, Lothaire Bluteau is the French war ace Charles Nungesser and Michel Monty is navigator Francois Coil.

Aside from marking her television writing debut, Lost Aviators also marks Chellas’ acting debut; she can be found in a 1920s scene of a crowd gathered at the airport for the takeoff. To get into character, the enthusiastic writer got her hair cut in a flapper style to go with her ’20s dress.

Now, with both projects wrapped, Chellas is working on a script for director Bruce McDonald called Claire’s Hat, which she says should go into production in the spring.