Dave Brown has been the only name in firearms safety on Manitoba film sets for about 20 years, but last year he switched gears to direct his first short film, the 12-minute romantic comedy Chump Change.

“I didn’t really go in with the idea that I’d like to be a good director or it was going to be a career or anything else,” Brown says. “I just wanted to do it just to do it, period.”

Co-written and executive produced with actress Amy Simoes, the duo financed the entire flick on their credit cards.

“Probably the hardest job was hers, because a day or two before we shot she had to drop the executive producer role and put on the acting role, which is a hard thing to do because there’s still lots of work to be done and things to be paid for and arrangements to be made,” he says. “She had to let all of that go and concentrate on her acting. She’s really good at it.”

Also starring Daryl Dorge, Ron Verwymeren, Andrew Cecon, Heather Ada McKenzie and Darren Felbel, the film was mostly shot in a single day at one location on a prosumer camera, a camera that is near professional quality, but not as expensive.

“We were not going to use a DSLR because it’s trendy and everyone knows about shallow depth of field,” Brown says. “I wanted to film on a $2,000 prosumer camera in HD and prove to people that you don’t need a DSLR to tell a good story. We used the lighting to control the exposure instead of the other way around.”

Helping out with the lighting and photography were two of the best men in the city, Alf Kollinger (director of photography) and Rob Rowan (lights).

“One of the things I told Alf at the very beginning was ‘I’m going to want to be behind the camera, but don’t let me behind the camera,’ like just kick me out of there,” he says.

“Rob Rowan is obviously one of the most experienced lighting technicians in town. I gave him all of these lights that we borrowed and rented or bought and said, ‘This is your kit, you gotta work with it.’ He’s used to working out of the back of two semi-trailers.”

When some people set out to make their first flick, many make the mistake of being too ambitious. Brown is adamant that a three- to 12-minute short is ideal, and can definitely tell a complete story.

“You can do the three act structure. You eliminate stuff that is fun, but it’s fluff. Why would you have an establishing shot?” he says. “Any scene that doesn’t move the story forward, it’s gone.

“As a director that’s helping out with the editing, a lot of editors see each scene as their baby and they don’t want to get rid of it. I’m not like that. If we spent three hours on a scene and it didn’t work, it’s gone.”

See Chump Change Sunday, Nov. 6 at the Park Theatre. Tickets are $10 and are available at the door. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the evening starts at 7 p.m. Two other shorts will be screened: Cougars of Winnipeg from Alf Kollinger and Adriana O’Neil, plus the Manitoba premiere of Pick from Calgary filmmaker Benjamin Ross Hayden. There will also be a Q&A featuring the filmmakers and cast, plus a special presentation.

-For more with Dave Brown, including how he got his start in film, visit Nicholas Friesen’s blog at www.uniter.ca.

Published in Volume 66, Number 10 of The Uniter (November 2, 2011)