I am making this film for a couple of reasons. First I’m interested in working in longer formats after producing a 1/2 hour television comedy for 5 years. Secondly I am keen to explore the minds of adolescent female as my 8 year old daughter both fascinates and confuses the hell out of me. In addition to that I believe that the depiction of smart and capable older girls/younger women ain’t all that robust. And lastly…I am making this film as a love letter to the most, in my mind, beautiful place on earth – the Terre Sauvage of Georgian Bay.

Chicknoe is the feature film component of a six-platform Transmedia experience about the search for an identity, a sound, and a warm, dry place to pitch a tent for the night.

For the uninitiated – Transmedia is an entertainment model that massages a larger, meta-narrative out of numerous, connected stories told in a number of different ways (tv, film, digital, online, books). It’s a narrative experience rather than a single entity viewing as the user follows characters and/or storylines across varying platforms.

For it’s part….Chicknoe is about two 16 year old girls, Stella and R., who escape a potentially fatal situation in the middle of the night in a canoe. When they drift a couple miles off shore and meet a weird guy named David they decide to keep up the ruse – a community thinks them missing and assumed dead – and take a two week canoe trip through the semi-remote, certainly ferocious Georgian Bay Archipelago. They meet a bunch of people, watch one fella take a paddle in the melon, and ultimately make a decision or three that will play out in the long and short terms for both of them.

It is a lovely two-hander that will share the spirit of David Lynch’s ‘The Straight Story’ and Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Wendy and Lucy’.

To want to invest in the film is to understand the bigger Transmedia Project. For a in-depth look at that + an alright read please check out this interview I did with Jeff Watson of remotedevice.net

http://remotedevice.net/blog/trans-canada-trans...

This post was cross-posted on Workbook Project’s Culture Hacker as well.

My prizes are excellent. $250,000 gets you a piece of the film. I’ll go you 70/30 on the film with that…alright, 60/40 you/me. We’ll make up the rest in neat Canadian ways.

Below that number…everyone gets an FoTP credit, that just is. From there, depending on the investment, I will be sending out: hand-written thank you notes via snail mail; t-shirts-you-want-to-wear with lines of dialogue from the film pasted on them; a moderately high quality monograph (read iPhoto book) of the iPhone photos I’m taking during the writing of the film; and three lucky folk will be sent copies of the script so they can mark ‘em up in red pen and send ’em back to me. This is a cool prize if you are a fledgling story editor. I’ll give you a serious crack at it – I’ll listen carefully to your notes and write you a letter of reference if you’re any good at it. E Mail me. Still gotta dip into your wallet for the privilege though. Sorry. Doesn’t seem right but all I got at the moment is the conviction that this thing is worth people paying to work on it.

Okay so….there it is. If you wanna go full-balls and send me a quarter million just email me and I’ll call you back on my dime. Plus I’ll courier you the script (following the next round of notes of course.) Anyone else – questions, comments or concerns drop me a line.

Thanks,

Bolton