Cameron Penney
After watching a film, the credits usually roll for several minutes—acknowledging the hundreds of people who contributed to its creation.
One of the most notable aspects of former resident Daniel Robinson’s 62-minute film, “Nestor,” is that once the credits roll, only one name appears: his.
“The energy came from just a lifelong drive to make my own film,” said Robinson, who now lives in Guelph.
“Once I started making it, I knew I had to finish it or else I would be more or less be letting myself down,” he added.
“That’s kind of where I got my energy to do it every day—just the drive to finish something that I’ve always wanted to do.”
Production of the film first began in 2011, although Robinson admitted he was “woefully unprepared” at the time.
“I didn’t have a concrete storyline,” he recalled. “I didn’t have what I feel like was the right equipment to get it done.
“I just didn’t have the drive to do it at that point in time.
“[So] I honed the storyline a bit more, and I used my mistakes from the first time around to figure out how I would actually make the film the second time around,” Robinson noted.
“I think that first experience was a crucial learning process to get the film actually made,” he stressed.
“I needed to fail one time to do it right the second time.”
After making the necessary adjustments to prepare for production again, Robinson set out to complete the film in 2013.
“I filmed on and off for eight months so I could capture the cycle of the seasons,” he explained.
“Winter, spring, and fall, I filmed almost constantly,” he said. “Then in the summer I filmed sporadically.”
While filming on his own, Robinson cited the audio as the most difficult part of the film to capture.
“A lot of first-timers will kind of skimp on their audio work and the film really suffers for it,” he remarked.
“I’ve done enough filmmaking in the past to know that I couldn’t skimp on the audio,” he added.
“Nobody would watch the movie if the audio was bad.”
Since Robinson portrayed the only character in the film, there is nearly no dialogue in the film. As such, the majority of the audio came from walking around the frame and interacting with objects.
During post-production, audio was recreated for certain scenes if he felt it could be improved.
Because Robinson also served as the cameraman, while also being the only actor on screen, Robinson needed to tell the story “as economically as possible.”
“Setting up the camera for many different angles when you only have one person—and that’s yourself—it would be very difficult,” Robinson conceded.
“It would be very exhausting and time-consuming to set up different frames.
“So I tried to tell stories in one single shot as best as I could,” he said.
Robinson noted he would shoot scenes several times until he was pleased with the acting and framing of them.
“I spent a lot of time just looking at my camera screen and making sure everything I recorded came out the way I wanted it to,” he recalled.
The title of the film, “Nestor,” is inspired by the location in which it was shot: Nestor Falls.
But it wasn’t the title Robinson had settled on from the get-go.
“It took a while,” Robinson said. “When I was coming up with ideas for the film, I had a million different alternate titles that the film could have been called.”
Robinson slowly whittled down the list of potential titles, then shared them with people he knew to generate feedback.
“For a long time, for many months, the film was called ‘Nestor Falls,’ being that I shot it in Nestor Falls,” he explained.
“I thought that was going to be the final title.
“[Then] I mentioned to my girlfriend one day that I was thinking of calling it just ‘Nestor’ and she just loved that idea,” he recalled.
Robinson’s film has been shown at some festivals, including the Whistler Film Festival last year.
“I feel very privileged in the fact that I made what many people consider to be a good movie,” he enthused.
“A few people have commented that it’s inspiring to see that it can be done with just one person.”
Until recently, the only way to see “Nestor” was to attend a film festival where it was being screened, such as the one in Whistler.
Robinson had expressed a desire to make the film available for local people to watch, and had been working tirelessly to make that a reality.
“I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the town of Nestor Falls,” he stressed.
Now the film can be rented online on a website called vucavu.com
Users can create an account and rent the film through the video-on-demand service for $4.
Once the film has been rented, users have access to it for 48 hours.
The website makes Canadian independent films available to stream in an effort to increase their visibility.
