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Films by Tim Boisvert

After years of playing in bands and writing music, I felt like I should develop my talents in the visual arts. I have loved movies all of my life, and I felt an ambition to become a filmmaker. I bought a camera and started filming, started writing, and now, over a year later, I feel like my skills are coming along and my development is comfortable.

List of films, in chronological order:

Winter - 2 minutes - November 2003 Winter was my first film. There was no script, just a camera and two winter afternoons. I filmed several scenes around Provo of the snow and its after-effects. Then Ben Boster wrote a nice piece of music and it fit really well with the motif of the film. I showed it at the BYU 48th ward film festival and received the "Best Cinematography" award. ---

The Buttercream Symphony - 5 minutes - December 2003 or January 2004 (I don't remember for sure) Ian and Marc from the 48th ward had done an interpretive dance at the previous year's talent show, and they wanted to do some kind of video presentation for their 2004 entry. We came up with this short film, sort of a musical, and filmed it one Saturday afternoon on Center Street in Provo. The best memory is of Ken playing a bum digging trash out of a trash can. It came out perfectly. This was a fun little project, just a weekend experiment. It gave me quite a bit of motivation, though, to get more serious about this whole thing. ---

The Night Owl - 12 minutes - March 2004 Kirk Pearson and I wrote a little script based on "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce, my favorite short story when I was in High School. I recruited Dan Helmer to play the male lead, a character who has a fatal encounter at a neighborhood convenience store. I actually created a web site for this movie http://www.mynameistim.com/nightowl/, and put quite a bit of time into the preparations. This was the first time Tyler Root and I worked together. He acted as the production manager, making arrangements for the filming up in Salt Lake. He found a great little grocery store near his house, and we went in one afternoon and asked for permission to shoot there late one evening. They agreed to allow it if we would cast one of their employees. Lee Ogletree was cast as the clerk of the store. Russ Root played a freaky-looking robber. This movie cost me a few hundred dollars to make when all was said and done, but a friend came forward and gave me a donation, enough to cover the vast majority of the project. It still seems weird to me that he would do it, but I'm very grateful. We actually haven't finished this movie yet. Ben Boster was doing the music, but got busy and never finished. We'll have it done by the summer, I promise! ---

The Sleepless Night - 21 minutes - August 2004 After being so frustrated with how Lester Friday had turned out, with so many technicalities and pre-production problems, and never being filmed, I just wanted to do something fresh and natural and simple. The result was The Sleepless Night, my first honest-to-goodness, completed, real short film. I wrote it one afternoon, it was a really simple concept: What do people do when they can't sleep? Do they go crazy, do they fill their time, do they wander the streets? There were just two characters, a guy and a girl. I enlisted Dixie Holloway as the female lead and Brad Clark as the male lead. The more Brad and I talked, though, he felt less and less comfortable with the whole thing. I then searched out Clay Bunker, a BYU theater student and former ward-mate, and he agreed to play the male lead. The result was a really tight little organic film, very quiet and dark and natural. Everything went well; we filmed it in one long night. Little Dave Christenson came down from Salt Lake and was my A.D., and Andy Bailey and Jason Pruitt helped with the lighting. Speaking of the organic nature of the film, and the lighting, all the lighting was provided by vehicles, a minor success in my eyes. The film screened at the 4th annual LDS Film Festival in January of 2005, and then at the UVSC Film Festival in February. I don't seem to be able to find the script anymore. I had it on a file server at work that accidentally got wiped away. ---

A Melodramatic Thesis On Love - 4 minutes - January 2005 I took a few months off from all the filmmaking at the end of 2004 to focus on travel and some of my short stories. I entered the 24-hour filmmaking marathon portion of the 4th annual LDS Film Festival as the captain of a team. Me, Dave Christenson, Russ Root, Krystal Root, and Andy Bailey were the official team, and we filmed up at Tyler's and Alene's houses in Salt Lake, as well as several other locations in downtown Salt Lake, and then edited it and turned it in the next morning. It was exhausting but rewarding. Out of 40 entries, we were one of 9 teams to be recognized with an award. Ours was an "Honorable Mention," but I was happy to receive even that! ---

Breakdown - TBD - February 2005 This is the new one. I leave tomorrow afternoon (February 17, 2005) to go film it in California. Mac and I came up with a cool script, and my stepbrothers Glenn and Allen will be the main actors. The script is available here.

Other film projects:

Lester Friday's 1983 Trip To The Lucky Lady Casino In Wendover, Nevada; And Subsequent Actions - never filmed - June/July 2004 This was my baby, and I was so sad to drop it. I'll pick it up again some day. I wrote a short story of the same title, it's available in my stories section. I originally didn't have any plan to make a short film out of it; I was happy with it as a short story. After a few weeks, though, I got the crazy idea to do this film, even though it would take a budget that I didn't really have and it would be a huge challenge for me. I had worked on Everything You Want for six weeks in February and March, so I felt like I could handle the challenge. I recruited Jeff Gustafson, a former ward-mate of mine and a celebrity in the BYU film department, to shoot it, and we even went out to Wendover and made arrangements to shoot inside the casino. As time went by, though, I just didn't feel confident in the whole thing. I felt like it was going to cost too much money, and I didn't really feel like I was being treated right by the Casino we found, I think the Peppermill, who didn't really want us with our cameras in the casino. They kept going back and forth, yes, no, yes, no, you can film here, no you can't film here, it was really annoying. Finally I grew exasperated and shelved the whole thing. The script is still available, and quite a gem, here. I'll film it someday. ---

Continuity - never filmed - January 2004 Not much to say about this one. It was a script that Kirk and I wrote, based on Cortazar's "Continuity Of Parks," a mind-twisting short story that Mac introduced me to. It never got off the ground, though, never past the script level. Here's the script. I don't have any plans to film it.