Since graduating from Mohawk College, Barrie native Aiden Martin has been looking at life through a different lens — a camera lens.
While at college, Martin says he spent most of his spare time working on theatre projects and since graduating has been involved in a number of student films.
The 25-year-old Barrie resident now has his sights set on a career in the film industry, and has written Starting Point, a feature-length film which he is in the process of casting and producing.
The film is semi-autobiographical, he says.
“I’ve acted in a bunch of short films and always kind of dabbled in writing and helping to produce some of my friend’s short films over the last seven years," Martin tells BarrieToday. "I met some interesting characters along the way."
All of the characters — as well as the story — are loosely based on archetypes of the people he met during that time.
“I noticed there are a lot of cliched insecurities that some artists have, so the end goal of this story is to give resolution to all of those characters," he says.
The premise of the full story is about a group of film students coming together to create their final assignment before graduation.
“They want to challenge themselves by producing a hard short film that is going to have these effects and a variety of locations, but as they do that it reveals the things they personally need to work on before they are ready to leave college and become working adults,” Martin says.
“That is the journey of the story, not about them making a film. It’s about them figuring out how to grow up.”
Martin began writing the script shortly before the pandemic and shot the proof of concept in October 2020.
“We are going independent film style. My plan is to crowd-source and launch a Kickstarter campaign within the next couple of months while also digging out a bit of private investment. I have also been working on financing it on my own,” he says.
The intention is to begin shooting next summer.
He is also documenting the whole process, which can be viewed on YouTube.
“The reason why I decided to do that is it’s a kind of meta-story, where it’s about a group of film students making a film, so there’s a lot of the film’s personality that is going to be in that little docu-series.”
While Martin says he hopes to sell the finished film to online streaming services such as Zulu and Amazon Prime, it will first make its way through the independent film festival circuit.
“The sky is the limit.”
