CHICOPEE — After partnering with the mayor’s office and the Chicopee Cultural Council to launch Singing Bridge Pictures with the goal of producing a short film each year, ChicopeeTV’s first project, “Vestiges,” is ready for audience members to view it.
A special viewing event will be hosted on Thursday, Oct. 17 at Chicopee Comprehensive High School, 617 Montgomery St. The entrance will be the back door with the balloons set up.
The free event starts at 7 p.m. with treats and a tour of the ChicopeeTV studio before screening the film at 7:45 p.m.
The movie is rated PG-13 due to the frightening imagery of a monster and is 13 minutes long.
There will be a Q&A with the cast and crew following the screening.
Chicopee TV Producer and Director Wade Wofford said the film was not 100% ready for screening and was being scored, color corrected, sound designed amongst other things, as of his interview with Reminder Publishing.
They will be ready for the Oct. 17 screening, and he said, “We’ve got a date that we’re backing up toward which is helpful to have that external deadline or else we would tweak forever.”
This locally produced horror film was shot right in Chicopee earlier this year and is ready right in time for Halloween.
With the world premiere screening less than a month away, Wofford shared his feelings on the process so far.
“It feels great. I’m really, really proud of it. I’m excited to share it with the community but I’m most excited to share it with the sort of volunteer participants that worked on it with us because they haven’t seen it yet,” Wofford said.
Without giving too much away, Wofford gave a summary of the film.
It’s about a young women named Melanie who is a photographer and comes home from work one day and finds a strange box on her front stoop. She opens up the box where there is a camera inside. She goes into the next room and digs around the deepest parts of her closet and pulls out her camera bag and realizes her camera is missing and the camera that has been wrapped up inside the box is hers.
Wofford explained, “You sort of realize that this isn’t the first box she’s gotten. She’s gotten multiple ones and so it’s sort of about just where the box is coming from, whose giving them to her and why. One of the interesting things about horror is how much do you explain. As filmmakers we have a whole history and a folklore and a sort of mythology of what is happening, why it’s happening but you can’t necessarily spell all of that our for your audience so it’s finding that sweet sport.”
Although Wofford mentioned the filming and post production has gone smooth so far, one thing that did change during the filming was the title of the film.
The film was originally titled “The Box,” but after seeing hundreds of films with the same title on IMDB, the film was changed to “Vestiges.”
When talking about the title, Wofford said, “Without spoiling too much, the vestiges of something left behind. The vestiges of previous victims, current victims, future victims and how the boxes might relate to that.”
The goal is still to submit the film to festivals. The next steps are the figure out which ones to submit to and hopefully get accepted at.
ChicopeeTV wanted to start producing short films to engage on a project with the community, according to Wofford.
The shoot took place the weekend of May 3 and Wofford discussed the process.
He said, “Filming went smooth, very smooth. We had some really long days. I think our longest day was 14 hours and you sort of worry that people will start fading or peeling off or they’ll get pissed off you’re not finished at the time you said you be finished. There’s often times on the film set working under stressful conditions, tempers can flare, personality conflicts can rise up and there was none of that. There was no drama on set, there was no fights between people, there was no fighting which sounds like a small thing but it’s a pretty big thing when you put 15 creative people in small quarters where it’s really hot for 14 hours at a time.”
Not only will the film be rewarding for the crew when it is completed but Wofford also explained that ChicopeeTV wanted to find a way to make community-based short films by both putting its equipment to use, train community members how to use it in different ways and bring the community together in the act of volunteering.
Wofford said that he started training crew members on the departments they’ll oversee.
Wofford added, “This year’s [film], we were intentional in not biting off more than we can chew. We’ll probably dive right in the fall to figure out what will next year’s film be before so we can create a budget for it and write a grant.”
The Chicopee Cultural Council awarded a $2,300 grant for this project.
