Thank you for joining me for another episode of YQG In Bloom.
My name is Tracy Martens and today I'm so excited to sit down with my next guest and
talk about an upcoming project that he wrote and directed and at the end of this TV series
you might have a chance of winning $100,000.
I've got to look at this.
He is a film director, a screenwriter, editor, producer, and music video director, Gavin
Michael Booth.
Hi.
Hello.
It's so nice to see you.
Yeah, good to be here.
And I forgot he is also an actor because he was in Vampires Zombies from Space.
Oh my God, I love that show.
That movie turned out phenomenal.
I mean, they're just all friends of mine.
So I would have, you know, it was sort of a hey, can you come in and came here with
tomorrow, be clean, shave in and that was sort of the details.
I didn't know what I was signing up for, but...
There are such good gifts.
Yeah, it was so much fun.
And seeing the premiere, like everybody should see Vampires Zombies from Space whenever it's
publicly available.
It is so good and yeah, they blew me away.
I'm seeing it at a festival in Wisconsin that I happen to be at coming up too, so I can't
wait to see it again.
And then it's in Toronto at the Canadian Film Festival.
I didn't know that got announced.
Yeah, it was great.
It was on Facebook today.
Yeah, that's a really, really good festival.
I'm super happy they're there.
Oh, they're amazing.
And so are you.
You have your hand in a little bit of everything.
Do you have a favorite part of behind the screens?
Writing.
Writing?
That's all I wanted to do was be a screenwriter.
But you know, starting my career 20 years ago in Windsor, there wasn't Facebook, there
wasn't, you know, there wasn't even my space.
You couldn't just post somewhere and say, hey, anyone else at Windsor want to make movies?
So I just sort of learned.
I had been doing videography in high school and editing little silly short films with
my neighbors and things like that.
But it was, I always wanted to be a creative writer and then fell in love with screenwriting.
But they're just, I just learned everything else out of the necessity of like, if I'm
going to see any of these scripts turned into anything, I guess I'll do it.
Yeah.
Partly not understanding like, I could just find other people to do the other roles, you
know, but then kind of fell in love with all of that, you know, but writing and editing,
I think are probably my favorites because when you're writing, there's no wrong answer,
right answer.
You have creative freedom.
You don't have to worry about budget or schedule or time and it's somebody going to like this
enough to fund it.
And then once you get through production, which is always a slog and that's where everything
can go wrong and you've got to compromise constantly and try to try to compromise in
a way that doesn't ruin the creative integrity of what you're doing.
And then when you get to editing, you're like, okay, well, these are now the building blocks
that I'm stuck with.
So now I have to figure out how to have freedom again to reinvent and I often find that my
projects, ones that come out of editing have shifted quite a bit from how they were originally
stated in the script, what was shot on set and just finding a new layer or a new life
to them through just constantly rearranging.
It is fascinating what I've learned, like even watching my husband edit a three camera
podcast and it's like, there's no way in hell I could do it because I have, I really do
have OCD and it is so bad that I would take me days to do one little thing.
So I leave it to him.
The trick is to have deadlines because that, you know, we have a new trailer premiering
in a couple of days.
And today I'm still sending out just little five second clips of people being like, Hey,
I'm thinking about this sound effect instead of this one and this one, you know, just like,
I will just keep tweaking the thing until somebody rips it from my hand.
So deadlines are key or I would never finish anything.
Like I said, learning little things, even watching some practices of behind the scenes
for the play, the price of freedom.
And I just took a workshop on a screenwriting and it's like, subtext, subtext unless you're
a hallmark movie, then you have zero subtext.
I love the hallmark movies, the cheese, my wife, Axon, I can't complain.
She does.
I didn't know that.
I don't know.
Yeah.
More lifetime.
She's usually more the dark, mysterious characters.
Yeah.
She's a lot of stuff as well.
She's she's had a good couple of years.
Yes, she has.
And in case you're wondering, we're talking about Sarah Booth and she, I have yet to meet
her, but I do love her stuff.
I saw her in a couple of the TV shows that she's been on.
I mean, yeah, she's done stuff for Netflix and Prime and CBC and Fox.
And so you two are busy.
She's on a new show next week called Doc.
It's a new medical show on Fox.
She'll be on Tuesday, the guest next week.
Wow.
So do you guys ever see each other?
Yeah.
It's a one, because you know, the myth is a busy actor, a busy filmmaker is just constantly
busy.
It's like, no, there can be very long, slow periods like between those.
Oh, no, but at least I can always be editing something else or writing the next thing.
You know, you can you can use your time wisely.
I hear you because I'm the type that I don't like sitting because if I sit down, then I
feel guilty.
I should be doing something else.
So I was looking again on your IMDB, which you have done a ton of stuff and you seem
to resonate toward the thriller horror type genre.
It's probably 50% of what I do.
Yeah.
Now what makes that different from like, is it harder to edit and direct them right?
It's typically easier to find funding for like, you know, horror and thriller sort of
a proven genre that don't always need massive star power behind it to make it happen.
I don't think that any, any one genre is particularly more difficult to edit than any other difficulty
in horror.
Sometimes the practical effects can take a long time and just properly allowing budget
and prep time and everything to make that happen.
But I've been, I can't think of any standout example.
We did a project for Blumhouse.
It was the world's first live movie that like something nobody else had ever done before.
So that was nerve wracking in terms of like, when we like start the production and the
world's watching, there is zero going back.
There's no room to stop or start.
And if a camera stops working or battery dies or something happens, we're really boned,
you know?
Oh gosh.
Way too nerve wracking.
It's like theater without any, without any scene changes or intermissions.
Oh.
It's like nerves gray hair, for sure.
Yeah.
Our film, Last Call, I always joke that because we did that movie in a true single take.
So when we yelled action, there's no cuts until the end of the movie.
And that, I had zero gray hairs before we started that movie.
And it's just, it's funny too, because some, some will hide cuts and some, some do it true.
We did the true version, but now it's funny because most people are going to watch it on
a platform like Tubi that inserts commercials.
So we're like, why did we go through all of that?
If there's just going to be commercial breaks anyways, but say love you.
Yeah, it is what it is.
Now do you still do music videos?
I do.
Not, not as much as I would like to.
Mostly just kind of like for friends or artists that I've been collaborating with for a long
time.
Just recently released two for Billy Rufool, you know, Leamington native and now international
superstar.
And we, we have a third one coming up together.
And there's a band late nineties, rock band, third eye blind that I've worked.
Yeah.
I've worked on and off with them for years and I'm sure there'll be more videos in the
future and I just wanted to scare her recently.
Yeah.
You know, I was, I was a big fan of theirs before I started working with them.
And that's been kind of a huge joy to just over 20 years do.
So when he kind of just popping out there, their guitarist, Chris Reed is also a brilliant
filmmaker and animator.
So he's also able to create a lot of the content for the band.
So to even still have a seat at the table or get invited is super fun.
It sounds it.
Now, is all your work in the Windsor, our six County area, or do you travel all over
kind of, kind of all over.
Like I've always tried to bring projects back here.
I live in Toronto for a couple of years, lived full time in Los Angeles for six or seven
years and back and forth between Windsor and Los Angeles pretty much even every year
right now.
But even finding work in Los Angeles, I try to bring it back here when possible because
I just know how to like stretch a dollar a bit better here.
It's just the, the, the regulations and you know, there's not really film permits here
and things as much easier to kind of, and any city that you grew up in is a lot more
like, Oh, I know exactly who to call.
We need a tractor.
Got it.
I'll have that tomorrow.
We need a winery.
Got it.
We'll be there this afternoon.
Other cities that you don't know people that's, that's just more difficult unless you have
a local producer or, or location scout doing that.
Film crusher, the TV series coming out soon, we shot the majority of it in Worcester, Massachusetts
and a few days in Los Angeles because we had an original song written for the, for the
movie and the producer that was recording the song and it's our actress that sings the
song.
So Brittany was going to sing it in LA.
I was like, well, we got to go to LA to film that and work it into the show somehow.
So just kind of go where the work is or if I were with something that took place in the
desert, not, not doing that in Windsor, you know, for sure.
So, let's talk about this TV series and Dream Crusher, but it's actually called Reward.
Yeah.
So if you think Reward is sort of the, the brand title of the series, if you think of
like an American horror story where every season they had a difference, there's, there's
hotel and there's My Roanoke Nightmare and there, and there's the, I forget what the
witches will coven.
You know, there's, there's the subtitle because it's an anthology series.
The intention of Reward is that season two will be a standalone story from season one.
But it'll have a different title.
Season three will have a different title, different cast and everything, but Reward
is the, is the simple, easy to remember brand name.
Now, this is on a new streaming platform that's just starting.
Which is called Reveal, which is R-E-V-E-E-L.
It's been around for about three or four years.
They're doing a really great job of curating independent film, web series, documentaries.
They're sort of like on their path to becoming the independent version of Netflix where,
indie filmmakers can thrive.
And this is their first original narrative series.
So this is their big push into trying to engage audiences in a new way and just, just say,
hey world, we're, we're here.
You should be part of what we're doing.
Now how do you win the money in Dream Crusher?
So yeah, so the idea is in Dream Crusher, it's, it's about a pop star that's been murdered
and you're trying, at home, it's, the show is mildly interactive.
You could just sit and passively watch the seven episodes and enjoy it as a regular series.
But what's the most interesting to me about the reward concept that the executive producer
William Chevry had is to make it partially interactive, meaning that at home, as a viewer,
there are clues hidden inside of every episode.
And there's a bit of an online real world scavenger hunt where we give you the hints and you have
to go out and find, maybe there's a clue buried over here on Reddit.
Maybe there's something here in the real world.
Maybe there's a social media post you're supposed to be paying attention to and that, that will
help you solve the case.
So you could maybe do it if you're really keen on murder mysteries just by watching the show,
but we're giving people this advantage to, to have more and it's sort of like a cross-platform
storytelling.
Again, you can watch the series and not miss anything, but you're going to get a lot more
enjoyment out of the characters and, and the world that we've built by doing the interactive
portion.
And then there's, there's an app and a website that you, you sign up as a detective.
It's reward series.tv.
People can sign up right up until episode six is airing.
So the second last episode, you can catch up all the way to there, but the idea is you
go in and you, you enter your answers each week and it just kind of keeps tallying a
score behind the scenes.
And at the end of it, you have to correctly, you know, like clue, you got to, you got to
guess who, what, when, where, why kind of thing.
And then you also is based on the amount of points of how well you played the detective,
you know, hunt online and prove that you were the best detective.
Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun.
It's been a lot of fun to develop.
Because nothing worse than I'm the type that I always usually figure it out.
So this is going to be something that, you know, you're not going to be able to figure
out the first.
Let's, let's hope I've written something that that's not, not obvious from the, from
the get go.
I think I've got enough twists and turns along the way.
How long did it take you to write?
Not overly long.
At least in terms of outlining the idea, I'll just sort of use every second I'm given until,
until it's time.
We were, we ended up pushing back production from our original day, just, just with, you
know, typical headaches and things that happen all the time.
But we, you know, so in there, I'm still, I'm still writing, I'm still tweaking and
even the editing, there's still some things where I'm like, Oh, it'd be really great if
I had this like voicemail from this actor.
So I'm just going to get the actor to record it at home and send it in.
So I'm still kind of like writing in the edit process.
Oh my goodness.
Again, until they, until they tear it out of my hands.
Now, how many have you filmed so far?
How many?
So we shot, basically we have, all that we have left is a little bit of pickups, which
is just a day or two of little scenes that we always knew we were going to shoot later.
We just wanted to get the bones of the series edited and then decide for one, for sure,
if we need these elements before we spend money and time making them.
And, and just to make sure that when we do them, they're going to, because of the interactive
nature of it, there's, there's more stuff we have to film that goes outside of the series
as well.
So it's a little more complicated than a normal, normal shoot, but it's 90, 95% shot, 90%
shot.
Oh my goodness.
And how many episodes will it be?
Seven episodes.
Seven.
And you, I know I saw you on the Dan McDonald show that there was a second season.
You already planned?
That's the plan.
Yeah.
There's big plans like reward is reveal and reward are going to push, keep pushing forward.
So I've signed on to do more and we're looking at shooting them in Windsor.
So I'm sort of the show runner of it.
So whether I continue writing and directing every season or just serve as sort of story
consultant and, and, and managing producer for it, I have that option as well.
But we've cooked up a pretty, pretty good thing for, for season two.
Oh yeah.
Any hints?
That would, that would make you have an advantage to the, you and your audience would be that
much closer to the prize.
Oh no, I'm not asking for any of the prizes, but I know it's going to be in Windsor.
Yeah.
Hopefully.
The plans to shoot season two entirely in Windsor, which is super exciting.
That works.
I can't wait to see that.
That'll be fun.
Yeah.
I mean, we'll, we'll have you out for a set visit or maybe you'll have a cameo in there
somewhere.
So yeah.
Now you have a lot of other shows that are coming out soon as well.
You're like always on the go.
Holy cow.
It's the only way to do it because otherwise you end up with these years long gap in, in
between projects.
And this is my full time sort of life and career.
So I have to, I have to keep swinging from one bind to the next, but I have a film that
I directly called Sydney versus Sean that'll be out sometime in the nearest future.
And that's, is a, I call it a romantic, an unromantic comedy, I think.
I don't know if that's a term that other people have, but it's a, it's, it's a, it's
really a dramedy about two people that are getting together to sign their divorce papers
after a year of separation.
And the notary is late show to be there, to be the witness and sign off on it.
So the couple falls into kind of all their, their old trappings and arguments and the
scripts that Ryan Powers wrote, he's the lead actor in it and the writer, it's sort of seamlessly
wheezed between the past and present and has this unique structure that brings the audience
kind of up to speed as to what, what dissolved in this relationship and how it all happened.
And has a lot of interesting twists and turns that I don't think people will see coming.
So it sort of bucks convention a little bit in terms of that, but it starts, Janelle Parish,
that if you were a pretty little Liars fan, she was Mona on the series and T.R.
Knight, who's, you know, he's on Flight Attendant right now, but probably is forever remembered
as Giorgio Malley on the Grey's Anatomy in the, in the early cast days.
And then Ryan, who writes it and stars has had great roles on She-Hulk and the Mandalorian
and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and, you know, it's always kind of, yeah, it's always kind
of working his way out there.
So, you know, very, very small cast and crew, but something that we shot in Los Angeles
about a year ago and are at the very, very, very final like stages of finishing that one
off.
It seems to take a while between a shoot and when it finally gets released.
You want a little bit of breathing room so that you can just like make an edit, everybody
gets to watch it and absorb it, have notes and conversations about ways to kind of keep
changing it.
But in the indie world, it just, it comes down to, it's the, the, the time quality.
Do you want it good, good, fast and cheap?
You can only choose two of those.
So you usually want it good and cheap, so it's not going to be fast.
And that's just part of the indie process.
If you don't have the same budget that a Netflix has to just keep throwing money at something
until it's done.
Now, do you prefer working in indie stuff where it gives you a little bit more liberty?
Yeah.
Creative control, creative control could have a really bad connotation of like, I'm gonna,
I'm a megalomaniac and I'm gonna like micromanage this thing and like not take anyone's input.
But creative control to me is just important that it doesn't just come down to somebody's
like stupid or impulsive decision to like, yeah, we're going to change the ending on
this because, because one person said that they don't like it.
I've had entire music videos that have been scrapped by the record label because one or
two people were like, well, I don't like this one thing in it.
And they panic and go, huh.
And then the world never gets to see all of those actors and hair and makeup and camera
team and director that put so much time into doing it.
So I just, I guarded a little bit more safely there, but I also believe in my creative instincts
that I would never do something against the interest of the film.
You know, and you see some films where like they could have cut half an hour out of this
easily.
Maybe they should have had a little less creative control, but to me it's more, it's more just
about being able to protect that and have the freedom to explore in the edit where I
go like, I think if this scene came before this scene or we, we cut this line off here,
it's gonna have so much more of an emotional impact and not have to necessarily have somebody
who's instantly say, no, you're not doing that.
But that kind of, I don't know.
It's such a weird thing to hire an artist to do something and then try to creatively
stifle them.
It's like, you wouldn't necessarily hire your house painter and then just keep telling them,
no, not that color, not that color, not that color.
It's like, you know, sometimes you just, if you believe in the experts you're working
with, you're gonna, you're gonna get something magical.
You have to have a little bit of trust.
Yeah.
It goes a long way.
Yeah.
Now I noticed in Windsor, we have got a lot of really creative people that have just seemed
to come out of the woodwork in the last couple of years.
What would you give them as advice on how to get to maybe where you are?
Broke and still trying to make a living.
Hey.
I'm kidding.
No, they, it's, I think just constant output is always advice I give younger filmmakers
and actors.
It's just like, even if you're not being paid to do something, volunteer on other projects,
you know, know your worth and don't overextend favors too much.
But be, be working because the more you collaborate, the more those people are going to call on
you for future projects, the more you're building a community.
And we have a pretty good filmmaking community in Windsor right now where a lot of people
are working together, like lending gear back and forth, like hiring each other on all of
their music videos.
You start to see the same faces and the same crew on a lot of things.
And that's really inspiring because we didn't, we didn't have that, you know, 15 years ago
when I lived here full time and, and before that, but it's also just the technology's
gotten easier so anybody can kind of now go out and create.
But I think just make stuff, go make a short film on the weekend and put it on YouTube
the next day.
Don't just, just learn to put your stuff out there and deal with the, the feedback and
the harsh criticism and everything.
Just just once you get over that, you sort of just enter a freedom zone where you're
just going to keep creating and all of that just bounces off of you.
The bad criticism bounces off of you and you just want to keep it.
It's kind of like training for the gym.
Like nobody's going to go play basketball for the NBA by sitting on the couch watching
basketball saying like, one day I'm going to do that.
It's like, if you don't get up and go to the gym and go play basketball and train and learn
and collaborate and challenge yourself, you won't get there.
So the sooner you just sort of do that instead of talking about it, it'll change everything.
Great advice.
And I wish I would have listened to it when I was younger.
Don't we all, don't we all?
I appreciate you being on this show and when is Dream Crusher coming out?
Dream Crusher airs episode one on March 18th and then you're, then you're off to the races.
It gets released every two weeks instead of every week.
This just allows people more time to do the interactive elements and never, we don't want
to feel like, you know, everybody's got work and kids and a social life.
We don't want people to feel like it's homework.
We want them to enjoy the process and have the time to think through their decisions
and answers.
We're trying this two week release model.
And I wish some shows would do that because sometimes like, I just want it to last a little
longer before I have to wait another two years for another season.
I was just talking about that the other day with somebody about how we miss back in the
day when you watched something once a week and that was it.
You couldn't binge it.
And I kind of like binging sometimes, but it's nice to have to wait to.
Yeah.
Well, we have it right now.
Are you watching Severance?
Because that to me is the best thing on television, but it's week to week.
So it's back to that.
Like I call friends and we have theory meetings and people are putting up theories on Tik
Talk and YouTube and Sarah and I are obsessed with it.
So we're always chatting about what something meant.
And like there is a bit more of an enjoyment to that versus sometimes I will binge six
episodes of something and be like, and somebody goes like, remember an episode two?
I'm like, I actually don't.
It just like, I don't have the storage space to watch that much stuff and retain it all.
It's true.
We watched 24.
We bingeed 24.
That was my first binge experience because it was DVD.
And that's when binge TV started, when you could get a season on because my friend, Ryan
Richardson, lent me the DVDs and I think you would love this.
And my ex at the time and I, we stayed up so late watching it that she had to call on
sick to work the next day.
And like I had to call off a meeting in the morning because we just, we couldn't stop,
you know?
We, we benched it and then probably a year or so later, like we just got it.
No, we did finish it again, but there was a lot of parts that like you said, you just
kind of catch it.
It's like, Oh, I didn't catch that before or I didn't see that.
And it's nice to watch.
Rewatching feels like a lost art form for the most place.
And I was talking about this the other day, all of my favorite movies, like my top 10
movies, I don't think I've watched any of those 10 movies in probably seven or eight
years at least because there's just, there's so much new content and like working in the
business, especially I'm like, I need to keep up.
I need to be relevant.
I need to know what's happening.
And also keeping up with, uh, blessed to have so many talented friends who's seeing episodes
they directed or episodes they acted in just trying to keep up with what's happening.
And I'm like, I haven't watched Stand by Me or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or, or Shawshank
or any of these movies in a long, long time.
And like I need to start like, I don't know, maybe, maybe Sundays I go to movie church and
I can only watch the classics, you know, gotta get back to basics.
We just binged happiness in, it's on Netflix and it's South Korean show.
And it is about what they call mad human disease and it's almost like a zombie type thing.
And not what you expect from a title that has the word happy in it.
We got into it.
We watched so many episodes that you didn't even realize you were reading it.
You could kind of figure out what was going on without even actually reading it because
they were just amazing actors, actresses.
One of the best lessons I learned at General Amherst High School in the communications
grade 11 class, my teacher Keith Herrick at the time would make us, we watched The Princess
Bride and Empire Strikes Back, but he turned the sound off and he said a great movie should
visually tell the story and you should always know what's happening, even if you, even if
you haven't heard it before.
And I at that time somehow had not seen The Princess Bride as a kid.
So I could, and I'm like, yeah, and that's, that's, that's a lesson that's always stuck
with me.
The film is a visual medium and you have to use that camera because it's too easy now
to just like, we're not shooting on film.
It's not, it's not expensive.
We'll just, we'll get 15 different angles of this and then we'll, we'll clip it together
in the edit, but it doesn't have the same flow and power and decisiveness of like this
shot on this lens for this length of time for this specific dialogue moment is, is what
the filmmaker wanted you to see and why did they choose that frame and you know, and sometimes
you are just at a race of, of time and budget where you have to shoot things a little quicker
and a little more traditional, but all of the greats, you see that they had a real sense
of what they were doing or trying to accomplish.
Thank you so much, Gavin.
Of course.
Happy to be here.
Great and definitely make sure to watch dream crusher and that is, I'm going to have where
you can catch it in my description so that we can get hunting out and I'm definitely
going to watch it.
Yeah.
Let me know if you, if you solve it.
I, the amount of people that have asked me to like, just give me a hint and we'll split
the money.
I'm like, I think I'm down to like $4.50 per person.
Like it's not worth very much anymore.
No, no, I want to figure this one out on my own.
I have to find.
Yeah.
I listen there, there, there is me who knows the killer is and no one else out there yet.
So I've done a really, we're very hard to try to keep the integrity of this mystery alive.
Awesome.
I'm going to end it on that note and my name is Tracy Martins.
Thank you for joining me for another episode of YQG and blue.
You all have a great day.