i said the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud

Shannon Webb-Campbell opens her piece on Jill Barber with some words about the movie. It's weird to be on the quoted side of things, having been the quotee for so long. It's all good until I start talking about why I cast her..."Jill has, like, a great face? And cool clothes. And you know, whatever..."

From Shannon's great piece on ChartAttack.com:

Apparently Brian Borcherdt isn't the only person dumbstruck by Jill Barber. The Halifax-based songbird made her on-screen debut at this year's Atlantic Film Festival in director Tara Thorne's short film about adoration, I Said The Loud Part Quiet And The Quiet Part Loud.

"It's a very whimsical short film," says Barber, over coffee at the bookish Trident Cafe in Halifax. "It was really cool to be a part of it. I don't know how I felt about being Brian's object of affection. I mean, I was acting, you know?"

Barber portrayed Borcherdt's mute all-consuming infatuation, as scenes illustrate the scruffy rocker falling off his chair without any prompting by merely thinking of her. Snippets of Barber's physique frame various shots.

"I did want to write something for Brian, and I was trying to figure out who the girl should be, and I knew it would just be chunks of her," says Thorne. "Then I thought, is that anti-feminist? You know, like Hustler or something, where they cut the heads off the women? Is that bad? I thought, nah, it's not sexualized, it's just arty. Jill was the first person I thought of. She has a really great face and she dresses very nicely. She's not trendy, but she always looks really great."

("Webbing," not "clipping," yes?)

Later, Tara Thorne — arts editor at the Coast and a weekly entertainment columnist for CBC Radio Halifax’s Information Morning — delivers her first short, i said the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud. Thorne mixes pop-culture savvy (her title refers to dialogue by Krusty the Clown of Simpsons fame), great music (Sarah Harmer, In-Flight Safety) and a minimalist script and sets to tell a story of a man who is stunned by infatuation. In the three-minute film, musician Brian Borcherdt plays the besotted man to singer-songwriter Jill Barber’s oblivious woman.

"I feel my nausea subsiding," Thorne says afterwards. "When I heard the mandolin come up on the Harmer song [I Am Aglow, which starts the film], I was like, 'Oh shit.' And then the picture came up and it looked and sounded great and I started to feel relieved."

Istlpqatqpl's spare quality grew out of necessity and purpose. "The white room idea was a total location cheat to save time and money," Thorne says. "Otherwise I wanted minimalism because it was really like bringing a piece of writing to life, and I wanted it to be clear what I was saying, so I didn't want a bunch of props or fancy crap in there getting in the way."--Sean Flinn

The whole shebang be here.

We screened on Monday.

Dan, Alicia, Jill, Mike, Matt, John, Steph, Chuck, Megan and myself were all there. I don't have any photographic evidence, even though I was carrying my camera, because I was too busy talking to people and trying not to throw up into my hands.

Programmer Lee Anne Gillan, who was my first copyeditor at The Coast six years ago, passed me outside Park Lane and told me all the filmmakers got to say a few words. "Don't talk too long, and say something funny," she ordered.

Instead I just sucked up to the film festival, which deserves it.

Loud part screened third, after Megan and Rosemary Hanson's The Visitor, which was shot in my house in one day this June. I knew we would be next, somehow.

Sarah Harmer's "I Am Aglow" came up -- I could probably play that opening mandolin myself now, I've heard it so many times -- and I opened my eyes and Brian was walking toward me and it looked and sounded AMAZING.

Relief.

John was sitting in front of me and he laughed more than anybody when the opening car crash hit. (He made the crash.)

Milk gag: Healthy laughter.

My beloved Frisbee gag: Minimal laughter. (What is up with that?)

Chair gags: Polite laughter.

Starbucks scene: Great laughs, especially on Mike and Chuck's shared WTF look and Brian's easy-to-miss shrug.

Window scene: To me this is where things are getting particularly sad, but the sold-out Park Lane audience was laughing to kill itself. Brian staring at a brick wall is funny, but not ha-ha funny. In that moment I felt like Lucy Fernandez screening It Creeps.

Full-body oblivion: complete silence. Yay.

And two rounds of applause: one when my credit came up, the other after the credit roll.

PHEW.

Thanks to everybody who attended, laughed politely or said nice things to me.

On to the next step.

Whatever the fuck that is.