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A filmmaker with roots in the Border City has decided to bring his talent home.
Chris Lorenz, who grew up just south of Lloyd, recently wrote a script and was granted funding to produce a short film titled ‘Drier Down Here’.
“I got funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to make a short film in the Lloydminster area. It’s going to be a short horror/coming-of-age film about a young boy who is trying to wrestle his desire for a new dirt bike with the presence of a demonic creature living in his family’s farmyard,” said Lorenz.
“I grew up on a farm south of Lloyd, so a lot of it is going to be shot around my parent’s property and the surrounding area, and a lot of the backdrops and setting will be kind of inspired by me growing up out here.”
Lorenz explained how when you’re a kid, especially growing up in a farmyard, things can be so scary. He plans to re-capture that feeling of getting home late at night and trying to walk inside your house as quickly as you can.
“It’s kind of interesting because I don’t usually really focus on that sort of thing and I’m really not that big of a horror fan. I guess it’s kind of a thing that’s popular these days—it’s kind of a more arty horror … movies like ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Get Out’ and stuff that have been coming out in the past decade,” said Lorenz.
“It kind of opened my eyes and I was like ‘hey, maybe I could try to do something like that’. So it’s kind of trying to meld a genre like horror with kind of a more personal or independent genre like coming of age.”
His love for filmmaking started at a young age, and after high school, he chose it as a career.
“Like a lot of kids, I think, me and my cousins—when we’d get together during the summer we’d use our parent’s DV camera to go make some little horror movie or something, just while our parents were hanging out,” said Lorenz.
“So it kind of grew out of that, and then definitely in that class at the Comp is where I really started to think about it as something I’d like to do in the future. I went out to UBC and did a film production degree there, a four-year program, and since then I’ve been working in the industry.”
Lorenz will be getting some help from some of his ex-classmates to complete the project, as well as a couple of local high school students who are interested in the process.
“It’ll probably end up being around 10 or 12 people on the crew. I’m teaming up with some producers and cinematographers that I knew from film school. And then I’ve been talking to Alan Griffith who used to be my high school CDT teacher, which is our media studies class, and some students of his might come out and fill some helping roles, or production assistant roles, so that’ll be cool too,” he said, adding there has also been interest from students at Holy Rosary High School.
“We’re shooting at the end of August for about five days, and after that—the post-production phase will take a few months, so it probably won’t be ready and all polished and colour-corrected and sound-mixed until the end of the year,” said Lorenz.
“With short films, it’s kind of different in that your goal is to just kind of get it in film festivals, and that could be across Canada or across the world,” he said. “They kind of act as a calling card for up-and-coming writers and directors, so hopefully it will get into a few festivals, and maybe even some around here where people will be able to see them.”
Lorenz said as a ‘thank you’ to people in the area who were supportive, he’s going to look into doing a screening at the local theatre.
“I think that would be a lot of fun,” said Lorenz.
He and his crew are still looking for some support for a few things related to the film.
“We don’t have the biggest budget in the world, so in terms of location and props and that sort of stuff. We’ve been posting stuff on our Facebook, which is Drier Down Here Film, and if people want to follow us there and help out in any way that would be awesome.”
