GETTING AN INDEPENDENT FILM PROJECT OFF THE GROUND
GETTING AN INDEPENDENT FILM PROJECT OFF THE GROUND Interview with Ben Wagner, Post-Supervisor by day & Director/Producer by all-the-time-he-can-find By: Jessie Pickworth So, Ben…tell us a bit about the origin story of your most recent passion project. The name of the project is SURVEILLANCE: CASTELEVARA . Many years back, my writing partner, Matt, and I wrote an action spy thriller set in a fictitious city-state on the verge of a coup. I'd been trying to get it off the ground as a feature project and I kept hitting this wall when I would present the project to actors where they didn't fully understand the visual style of what we were trying to do; how we intended to depict the gamesmanship of the rival surveillance teams by playing with the visuals from a subjective point of view. I couldn't communicate it very cleanly in a verbal pitch or a look book, so I realized the way to get over that hurdle would be to shoot a teaser showcasing what the visual style would be.