Director/writer: Karethe Linnae – Producer/dop: Wade Ferley – Diary by: Joanne Morgan

January 1993: Best girl electric/ graduate student Karethe Linnae talks to a photographer friend who is fed up with taking erotic photos of women. Linnae suggests he switch to men. He balks at the idea. Inspired by the incident, she goes home and writes a short story entitled Off Key.

Vladimir Petrovich Sviethoff is a young concert pianist touring North America with his overprotective manager. Enter Agnes L., 20 years his senior, who is a legendary photographer of the famous and infamous. What starts as a routine publicity photo session between the two becomes an exploration into the vague parameters that separate art and desire.

Linnae’s partner, Wade Ferley, a commercial director with Circle Productions in Vancouver, reads the story and encourages her to turn it into a film script. Linnae, who is working on her Master’s Degree in Screenwriting at the University of British Columbia, decides to write the script as her thesis.

March 1993: She pushes quickly through development.

April 1993: Ignoring their pact never to work together, Linnae enlists Ferley as her dop and producer. John Prince signs on as production manager and Ron French, pm on Cannell Film’s The Commish series, as associate producer. With Linnae and Ferley’s extensive industry contacts, putting together a crack crew is no problem.

Linnae and Ferley start assembling the financing. ubc contributes $3,200. The crew numbers 40, and all the money goes for food, paint and pigeons. Friends contribute generator trucks and lighting packages. Linnae and Ferley ante up for truck rentals and other incidentals.

Casting isn’t so easy. ‘(When) agents and casting directorsÉfind out you’ve been a best girl electric for five years, they areÉreluctant to read the script,’ says Linnae.

Bruce Ward from Twenty First Century Artists in Vancouver does read it and sends Linnae some of his best people. Gabrielle Rose is cast as the photographer and David Lovgren as the young pianist.

Mid-April 1993: Prepping begins two days prior to shooting. John Chilton of Camel Productions offers his set building facilities for the weekend and French brings several set builders from The Commish with him. They borrow props and photographic equipment from friends and family.

Easter weekend 1993: Production begins. They have three days to get it all done. As a first-time director, Linnae has an ambitious shot list – 150. The extreme close-ups of clothes crinkling are hastily eliminated. She discovers her ‘simple’ script isn’t so simple.

‘I had never imagined how complicated it would be to have 40 pigeons, with a pigeon wrangler and helper on a roof while closing the set for the nude sequences and working with a piano double for the close-ups,’ she says.

Piano double Graham Fullerton’s arm hair is dark, Lovgren is a blonde. Rose does the bleaching.

Having an experienced producer and dop like Ferley is a godsend. He can interpret Linnae’s ideas in directorial shorthand. She wants a very monochromatic look. She gets it.

While moving to their second location, a studio on West Hastings, the elevator breaks and the piano has to be carried up seven flights. It drops. They now own a piano but the budget jumps by several thousand dollars.

Three very long days later production wraps.

Summer 1993: They receive a grant from the National Film Board’s Program to Assist Filmmakers in the Private Sector, which covers processing but not the cost of a work print.

Friend Taylor Moore of post-production house ETC Vancouver offers his D-Vision non-linear editing equipment. Another buddy, Reginald Dean Harkema, who co-edited The Grocer’s Wife with John Pozer, cuts the film.

August 1993: Fine cut completed. Linnae’s ready to start sound, but there’s no money. Composer Schaun Tozer works on the score for deferral. His agent groans.

Fall 1993: Linnae goes scrounging for more dough. She needs the 35-minute film finished by the January application deadline for the Cannes Film Festival.

November 1993: She applies to Telefilm Canada for finishing costs and gets $14,000.

Then she begs Vancouver sound wiz Paul Sharpe to give her ‘the lowest of the lowest deal he had given anyone and then cut in half.’ He does.

February 1994: The music and sound mix is completed.

The color timer from Gastown Post and Transfer calls. There are problems. Because they had overexposed the film to get a very pale hazy effect with shockingly bright light, several scenes will have to be reprinted.

The application is sent off to Cannes at the last minute.

April 1994: Off Key is one of two Canadian films accepted into the International Critic’s Week at Cannes. Even though Linnae is still paying off the piano, she and Ferley scrape up the money to attend the festival.

July 1994: The film screens at a film festival in Norway, winning a Dolby Sound Award, and is accepted at the Toronto International Film Festival.

September 1994: Off Key has its Canadian premiere as part of tiff’s Perspective Canada program.