Feature Film: Charlotte's Song

A young girl with a special gift struggles to overcome a mob boss’ influence over her family in this dark Dust Bowl fantasy, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Winner of five 2016 Leo Awards including Best Cinematography.

Official Selection Vancouver International Film Festival 2015

One of the "Top 10 most visually appealing films of VIFF2015

"Boardwalk Empire meets Days of Heaven cinematography" - The Georgia Straight

Charlotte’s Song premiered at VIFF 2015, and sold out all tickets on the first day. The festival subsequently added a third screening at their largest venue, the Vancouver Playhouse. We quickly sold out that screening as well. Images from the film were used in many newspapers around town to promote the festival in general - not just in relation to our specific movie.

Production on Charlotte’s Song started on June 1 st, 2014. By the time we went to camera director Nick Humphries and myself had been able to plan out the look and feel to a very specific degree. Nick and I had known each other for a few years by that point, and we had worked on several short films together.

Our carefully managed colour palette can be visualized in a "movie barcode". I extracted one frame every 48 frames, blurred them and shrank them to 3 pixels wide and then stacked them all up in a line. In this way you can get a sense of the general tone and palette for the film.

I like to think about this 'zoomed out' view of the visuals to map out what I think might be an engaging journey for the audience, and what express the emotional context of our film visually.