Film purists take heed. This is not a story about the preeminence of celluloid. This is the story of how digital video allowed two filmmakers and Canada’s top film studies program to take a good script and make the best movie possible.

The Family Man, written and directed by Jim Allodi and produced by Nick de Pencier, is the eighth film financed by the Canadian Film Centre’s Feature Film Project. It is the first shot on digital video.

It is early October and we are crammed into a storage room in the basement of a Wellington Street restaurant in downtown Toronto watching The Family Man’s main actors perform on a wide-screen monitor. The lead character, John Toma (Chris Owens), is confronting his girlfriend Rochelle (Veronika Hurnik) after she shows up with her husband at the restaurant where Toma works.

Despite there only being three lights to illuminate the scene, the basement is hot. Allodi sits on a crate in the storage closet, sizing up his actors as they recite his lines.

After pondering for a moment, the 33-year-old director asks for another take…then another…and another. This is the first sign to a visiting reporter of one advantage to shooting on digital. Few first feature films with a budget of $500,000 can allow a director this kind of freedom.

‘Video allows us to really strengthen the strongest points of this movie, which is the cast, the performances,’ says de Pencier. ‘For that, you need time on the floor with them, you need sometimes to be able to do take 10, you need the coverage, you need as many different angles as you can have.

‘If we were trying to shoot this movie on film, where every time the camera’s on you’re sweating because the money’s just going down the drain, we wouldn’t be able to do it.’

After crunching numbers on budgets based on both 16mm film and digital video, The Family Man creative team – which also includes Justine Whyte, executive in charge of production for the Feature Film Project – decided digital was the best way to maintain the integrity of Allodi’s script.

The story follows Toma, a restaurant manager trying to support his mother, put his brother through college and care for his sister, a developmentally challenged 30-year-old who steals babies from around the neighborhood. Toma must juggle family responsibilities with his career and a relationship with his boss’s son’s wife.

Needless to say, ‘it all comes crashing down,’ says de Pencier.

‘It’s a very character-driven story. It relies on a lot of very intimate, real moments between these very real characters.’

The Family Man is shot on a Sony DSR-500WS 16:9/4:3 switchable digital-to-digital video camera, which provides wide-screen or standard aspect ratios depending on the filmmaker’s preference. Using the digital camcorder allows The Family Man production to accommodate 29 characters, four key locations, and draw the best possible performances from the principals.

‘I’d say if we were shooting this on [16mm] film, as is,’ says Whyte, ‘we’d be looking at (a budget of) at least $1 million, or over.’

Digital also permits the filmmakers to view dailies immediately, thus allowing the crew to make adjustments on the fly, she says.

In addition, shooting only requires about 10 small lights, all of which can be plugged into a regular light socket.

‘We are a lot leaner and meaner than a film production has to be, just because the weight of the equipment, and everything collapses downwards,’ de Pencier says. ‘We’re right down to a nice skeleton crew of good people that you really wish for. It doesn’t become an albatross with tons of people.’

Another factor, which de Pencier actually considers almost a problem, is that scenes take nearly no time to set up. While a scene shot on film can take two hours to set up, The Family Man’s crew of 13 is typically finished the process in half an hour, he says.

‘We’re going so fast, it tires people out. There isn’t the down time that there usually is. It’s almost double the number of setups that you usually get in a day.’

Once editing is completed, the film will be up-converted to 35mm film. On a similar budget, a filmmaker shooting entirely on 16mm film stock is often left looking for a distributor to come in and help finance the film’s completion, ‘which often never happens,’ de Pencier says. The Family Man will face no such dilemma.

‘With the budget that we have, we’re going to have 35mm elements at the end of the day. We’re going to be able to take it to festivals and have it seen in its very best light,’ he says.

And few but the most avid and technically inclined audience members will be the wiser that Family Man was not shot on film, says Whyte.

In fact, she believes the rougher video look could help sell the picture once completed. ‘I think sometimes, if our films were a little rougher looking – and distributors have even said that to us – they would be more forgiving for any weaknesses that any one story or project may have,’ she says.

Whyte and de Pencier point to films such as the Buena Vista Social Club and The Brothers McMullen as movies that have not only done well, but thrived as digital productions.

‘A technician or a purest is definitely going to be able to tell that this was not shot on film. But the paying public, who don’t really know or care about that, just want a good story. It’s not going to affect them at all,’ Whyte says.

Still, de Pencier is quick to point out that digital was chosen out of necessity, not because he and Allodi loved the aesthetics of the medium. ‘Both Jim and I are film purists,’ he says. ‘We don’t like video as an aesthetic at all. But we were finally won over and convinced by some tests of blowing up [digital] video to 35mm.

‘This is a point at which we know we can tell this story with this look. You’re going to be able to get lost in the scenes; you’re going to be able to be transported into the movie.’ by Peter Vamos