Noah’s Truck is a heartfelt story about 3 separate family struggles. While Jennifer and Derrick have a difficult time saving their marriage, they also struggle to understand what it means to raise their 4 year old son, recently diagnosed with Autism. Alongside that, after being diagnosed with Leukaemia at the tender age of 5 years old, Franki and her young, single-mother, Lucy are facing this scary and new, world alone after learning the severity of Franki’s condition. And with a sudden move-in with their alcoholic and abusive Father, both Ben and Jacob are looking their worst nightmare in the face until they find comfort in a local therapist. But how are they all connected?
Noah’s Truck came as an inspiration to me after having a similar dream the night before writing the script. One of the storylines are very close and personal so it was partly written based on a true story. I sometimes find that both adults and children with disabilities can be labelled as “incapable” or “different” then the rest of us; so Noah’s storyline specifically was created because of how I wanted to show that with or without living with Autism, he still has the same feelings that everyone else in the room had, he just expresses them differently. My purpose was to show that people who live with any sort of disability should never be dismissed or looked down on by people who are not diagnosed with a handicap need.
While prepping for this project, I continuously found myself feeling protective over the characters while we were auditioning. Especially my young actors because their roles were what carried everyone else storylines and their connections to their family members, I really wanted to make sure felt organic and played well on screen. I also wanted to pay a lot of attention to my colour palettes and tones for the film. I incorporated a lot of the colour schemes to be used both metaphorically and symbolically just to really play up specific elements in the film and to also isolate a lot of the characters by assigning specific colours to specific characters; either by surrounding them or having them nearby certain colours. It’s funny because we had a situation come up which prevented our DP from continuing on in the shoot with us so we had to quickly bring another one on (who is now such a dear friend of mine), Jordan Oram. I remember meeting him for the first time and it was like our brains were wired the same. He knew exactly what my vision was and was able to pick up where we left off. He executed any and all my shots so easily without changing the overall tone of the film, which can be extremely difficult to do. I really was so fortunate to have him and work alongside him. But overall, I was and I still am very proud of how it all turned out.
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