Film House Residency Diary Spring 2009 By Tiffany Shlain

Fade up:

The Transamerica building, flanked by lush palm trees, pierces the blue sky.

A horse and buggy carriage clicks and clacks outside the window.

Circus performers waltz towards the tent. 

Young tourist lovers kiss and laugh on the boulevard.

A vintage trolley rolls by rumbling… CUT…

“The sound from the trolley is too loud to record the voice over, we need to retake that.” And so goes a typical day of production on our feature-length film, Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence.

Sometimes it feels like a twisted, fantastic version of a Hollywood studio dropped right down in the piers of San Francisco, but really it’s the setting of the new film house residency at Pier 27 that the SF Film Commission and The SF Film Society have so graciously set up for local filmmakers.

We felt incredibly lucky to be selected on this maiden voyage, converting a funky building along the pier into a filmmaker hub where filmmakers and their teams are in various stages of production. 

The program is similar to an artist-in-residency program I did at Headlands Center for the Arts. However this one focuses solely on filmmakers, giving us rent-free workspace surrounded by creative local filmmakers.

It is comforting to hear people in the next space over deal with some of the same challenges that we face. I have always loved the collaborative nature of filmmaking but there are definitely times where I feel alone in my particular struggle of the day. This environment reminds me that we, as independent filmmakers, are faced with many of the same challenges.

Aside from our art director who lives in Portland and a couple of animators based in New York, my crew is all based in San Francisco. We used to work from home offices, and I can’t say enough about how great it is to have everyone in the same studio space.

There are five of us working in our studio on our feature-in-progress. We are in the middle of production and have decorated our corner in Ikea’s finest of white, white and white — white couch, white curtains, white walls. I wanted to create a blank canvas for us to stick things to the walls and create. Our centerpiece is a glass table that was donated to our production that has glass spikes that can be placed on it for the true 80’s vibe: imagine Superman’s ice fortress of solitude meets Miami Vice.

The projects being incubated in the space range widely in various stages of production and genres. There are two women working on screenplays, one team cutting a documentary on marriage and a narrative project that is about to go into production. In another departure from the way they do things in the filmmaking city down south of here, all the teams on our floor are headed up by women… a refreshing reflection of the San Francisco filmmaking world.

We will be posting blog videos soon that show the workspace and our process making the film.