Josie

From the mind of writer Rene Le Bas Josie is a short drama exploring grief, blame and acceptance of the things we can't control. A grief-stricken woman starts receiving texts from her recently deceased daughter's phone number. She tries to find the culprit, all the while battling with a small paranoid voice in the back of her head that wonders if it is actually her daughter after all. The film comes from a creative team who have all faced grief in their lives and take care in telling stories that explore the journey that loss can take a person on and how they have learned from it.

Ocean Beach Pictures have recently received a grant of $3000.00 from the Emerging Artists Trust to help kickstart this small budget short. They are looking to raise more funds to use to ensure a higher quality of production equipment from their last short and to help pay their talented cast and crew at least a small Koha for their time. Coming from a background of freelance filmmaking we understand the importance of valuing the time people are giving up to help see this film be made.

The Team
Joel and Lachlan have been working together as filmmakers since highschool. Their passion for pursuing film as a career lead them to the New Zealand Film School in wellington where in they met fellow filmmaker Maggie. Since leaving film school these three have worked independently in their chosen fields of the industry as well as having produced their first zero budget short Remains in December of 2018. Their combined experience covers a wide range of departments making them an efficient, tightly bound team. The team all work collaboratively on directorial, creative and production aspects of the filmmaking. Their range of skills also means that in-house post production is possible.

Leading Talent
Shane Rangi, (Remains, Mortal Engines, Spartacus) and Tanea Heke, (Waru, Eagle vs Shark, Woman in Blue) are on board as our talent to play the mother and father in this story. Within our production team we have worked with both of these wonderfully talented actors and look forward to having them involved in this film.

Personal Bio's
Maggie is a freelance filmmaker living in Wellington, New Zealand. Her experience includes working in the production, costume, art & continuity departments. She has recently worked on the feature films 'Coming Home in the Dark' & 'Lowdown Dirty Criminals', television shows 'Savage Builds' & 'What Now' and the theatrical experience 'Second Unit'. As well as crew work, Maggie co-produced Ocean Beach Picture's first short, and is developing her own directorial projects with the team.

Joel Strawbridge is a cinematographer, and lighting/camera assist working in Wellington. Since graduating Film School at the end of 2017 he's been working as lighting/camera crew on feature films, shorts, and music videos, as well as shooting corporate videos and producing short films with the team at Ocean Beach Pictures.

Lachlan works primarily in sound engineering having worked as an on-set recordist as well as post sound designer on a number of projects (Web Series, Short Film, Documentary) including but not limited to Tragicomic Web Series, Upstream and Water Baby (loading docs). Lachlan has recently begun his foray into producing with his first official short Remains being released at the beginning of 2019.

Where the funds are going
Currently we are extremely grateful to have funding support from the Emerging Artists' Trust of $3,000.00 which is to go toward the bulk production costs and hire costs of preproduction and production. They have kindly agreed to put forward $500.00 of that grant as a match donor. We are looking for a further $2000.00 to go toward paying our cast, crew and writer a koha and improving the quality of camera, lighting and sound equipment.

Our reach goal of $4,500.00 would go toward supporting the post production process, improving the quality and speed of editing, sound design and colour grading through ability to provide them with a budget. We plan to use any remaining funds on the publication of the films release and submission of the film to local/New Zealand festivals.

Where will you be able to see the film
At the moment we are looking to release this film in a similar fashion to our groups' last film Remains. An initial private release on vimeo for our kind donors followed by a public release. However, should we make up to our reach goal our team will look to submit to a number of major New Zealand festivals hoping to let that be our official public release.

Click here to view our first short film Remains