The Discovery

It all starts here…

This is the first episode in our series. We hope you like it!

Synopsis (Spoiler Alert!)

We start out meeting all of the office staff at Connectrix, including the one slumped at her desk. Her name is “Cake” (Lise Moule). Everyone stops by her desk for a daily slice of her home made cake. They don’t seem to notice how unhealthy she looks, but they do notice the cake is left over from yesterday.

Brooke (Ash Catherwood) and Alice (Melanie Kastner) stroll in late - as usual. At their workstation, Reggie (Brad Cowan) has noticed Cake’s stillness. Captain Annoy-o (Mathew Boden) is his usual annoying self.

Someone has to go and see what’s wrong with Cake - a page over the phone doesn’t seem to do it. But who we’ll it be? It comes down to Rock, Paper, Scissors and Brooke loses.

Brooke ventures over. She’s not moving. Brooke needs a sure fire way to tell if she’s living or dead… and sticks a pencil in her ear. Nothing. That tears it. She’s dead…

Production Notes

Like all of our office scenes, this was shot on the top floor of Radke, a Toronto commercial production company. The exterior shot is the actual building we filmed in. They use the top floor as temporary workspace for commercial producers. We when got there, it was empty except for the cinder block desks and the chairs. Our Art Department, led by Stephanie Avery, did a fantastic job making it feel lived in. If you look closely at Brooke, Alice and Reggie’s desks, you can see all the toys and half finished puzzles and things. These guys are not very productive workers.

We wanted to start out by giving a sense of the geography of the office. It was filmed in four or five distinct chunks. The writers decided it would be a good idea to use a “walk and talk” a notoriously challenging shot. It entails lighting the whole area, and coordinating the foreground actors, the background actor, the camera… not to mention getting a great performance. Oh, and it is hard on the sound guys, too. On a bigger budget show it also involves a crab wheeled, pneumatic camera dolly with a dolly grip crew to work it. We had a tongue dolly. I think we lost track of the number of takes we did of it.

If I remember right, we shot the second half of it on a different day than the top of it with the “walk and talk.” When you watch a finished movie, it often seems like acting is the easiest job in the world. But the truth is that beyond remembering your lines and being in the moment, you are often reacting to something that isn’t there, that may have been done on on entirely different day. And, in our case, doing it for twelve hours straight. I think our cast did a stellar job. Especially Lise, who had to lie very still for days.

This episode was originally scripted as the first half of the first episode. When we went from 6 to 12 episodes in editing, that one was split into three separate episodes.