Amy Salvio, a young psychology student, decides one day that she wants to quit school and become an actress. With the help of her talented new friend Lydia, the two look to work together to achieve their coveted dreams in these unprecedented times.
The inspiration behind the film came to me when I was sick with COVID in April of last year when an idea sparked to tell a story of what it means to follow your dreams. Given the state I was in and being bored out of mind I wrote the story in two days and pitched it to my co-writer, Matthew Choi. He read the story and the first thing he said was “You are insane.” I took it as a compliment. With a crew waiting I was lucky enough to have three very talented actresses that were interested in the project to hop and join as a main trio lead of actresses. It took 2-3 months of planning which was a considerably short window to anything we have done before and it was even more daunting the fact that this was our first feature film.
Due to the situation of the pandemic, we decided to go for a small skeleton crew of sorts in which a four-person crew was assembled for the project led by Darya Amirshahi, Matthew Choi, Emma Meskes, and Andrew Quach. Thus production is on July 8th, 2022 with the working title METHOD. This local film was then made in Richmond Hill Ontario over the course of 11 days in early July last year. It was produced, written, and directed by myself Darya Amirshahi, and Matthew Choi. Production was a blast as we all learned a lot about each other and got a lot of experience dealing with such a major project. Many of our issues came down to location scouting as we had a lack of time to really find the perfect locations even though most ended up being good enough.
Time and money were always going against us as we had such a short window scheduling-wise to make this film. We had a few early morning shifts which were hard to get through at times but everyone was always optimistic. It was a pleasure to work with such talented people all around and is an experience I will never forget about. We were in production till around early August when we wrapped production and went into post-production for a good three months of editing. To our luck, the film managed to find a distribution avenue after being picked up by Amazon Prime Video Direct (US & UK) as well as Vimeo On Demand.
It was a real joy to create this film and is a story I am deeply passionate about which I am very excited to share with the world.
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