SFSDF Alums put a twist on film

Wow…Would you just look at the time?  We’re past due on an alumni catch-up article. Let’s do this!

There’s been a bunch of good news zipping around SFSDF as of late. From film festival screenings to great gigs and new classes to miscellaneous artisty, seems that our students and alumns are doing great things. Not knowing how to choose the subject matter for this post, we lobbed a dart at our Successful Alumni board which landed on the dastardly, determined and darned talented duo of Franck Tabouring and Deepa Pathak. (Narrowly missing news of Frank Lucatuorto and his Santa Cruz Film Festival screening, btw.)

These guys formed a tight friendship at SFSDF and have continued on as pals and creative cohorts even after leaving our hallowed halls. While one lives in LA and the other resides in San Francisco, they own and operate a successful production company and are booking shoots all along the West Coast. (See? Long-distance relationships CAN work!)

I reached out to Deepa for an update on their cinematic shenanigans.

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WHO is involved with the company FilmTwist?
Two students from Class 10 of the 1 year SFSDF filmmaking program. Deepa Pathak and Franck Tabouring.

WHAT are you doing – past clients, current projects, new work – and how have you landed gigs?

So basically, Franck and I decided half way through our program that we wanted to start up a production company together. We played around with some names, but Franck had the URL reserved for filmtwist.com and it seemed like a solid brandable name so we went with that. When we did our first gig we didn’t even really know that it was going to get bigger. We did a music video for Judy Zimbleman and a wedding for some friends and they really liked it. At that wedding we met photographer Joseph Pascua who liked our work and contracted with us to follow him for a year going to weddings, engagement sessions, etc., and then we did a sit down interview with him and produced a short promotional piece. That relationship that we forged with the photographer triggered us getting a number of other wedding and event gigs. Now we have around eight weddings booked this year and already have several booked for 2012. Believe it or not we even had a gig in Cancun, Mexico, but it was on our graduation date so we had to turn it down.

Our strategy has been to create a business that can fund our own film projects and also provide us with a living. So there are two sides of our business;  Wedding Cinema and Cinema Production. When people think of wedding videography they think ‘boring’, but because of the DSLR revolution wedding cinematography has changed a lot and has started to utilize alot of the same camera techniques you would use in shooting a feature or short film. It’s really just like making a movie, we are telling a story; a love story about a couple coming together and there are many creative ways to do that. So in the process of creating wedding videos we are able to serve people on one of the most special days of their lives, as well as hone our own cinematography, editing, direction, and production skills. The cinema production side has us doing some corporate promotional videos, but primarily our own projects. Currently, both of us are working on writing our first features and may shoot a few shorts before the end of the year.

CHALLENGES you’ve faced in getting FilmTwist going?
Starting a business has many challenges, but one of the biggest is balance. Trying to create a business that can fund our projects and provide a living, while at the same time still working on our own projects. Another challenge was in the beginning sometimes our costs were more than what we were getting paid, but we always looked at it as an investment in our future. Also Franck lives down in Hollywood and I’m up in the Bay area, but we’ve actually turned this challenge into an opportunity. Now we are trying to get gigs all up and down the West Coast all the way up to Vancouver, BC (where I am originally from) For example, this weekend I’m flying down to LA and then we are driving down to San Diego to cover a book signing event/birthday party. Another challenge is that there is a lot of competition out there, so it forces us to go above and beyond to make our work more personal so it stands out.

FAVORITE experience to date?
Probably one of my favorite experiences was a small engagement shoot that we did for a couple at Jack London Square. Part of what made it so great was the couple we were working with as well as being on the shoot during magic hour.

HOW did SFSDF prepare you to start a business?

SFSDF provided the space and venue to network and meet fellow filmmakers who are trying to enter the industry. Without that arena I would have never met my business partner. Taking one year out of your life and giving yourself the space to commit to something is really how SFSDF prepared us to start this business. Because the reality is that the business model is constantly changing, you can’t really teach people how to do it, you can just show them the path and then they have to find their own way. In two more years we may have to change the way we are doing things.

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So there you have it. FilmTwist is ready to take on a couple good projects so you might want to give them a call. And if you want to see some of their work and read more about them, spin over to their blog.

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