Atrium Pictures was founded by a couple of young guys who had a love for creativity and cinematic filmmaking. The production company has captured numerous weddings, developing them into cinematic wedding films, but the crew’s true desire lay in their dream of filmmaking. Unfortunately due to the expensive equipment required, the company invested their time in making wedding videos instead, ‘in order to fuel our dirty habit of making films’ says Jeysan Sivakumar, the Creative Director of Atrium Pictures.

Adithya Addageethala brought forth to the rest of the group the idea of participating in the T24 Project, hosted by the Toronto Youth Short Film Festival, a 24-hour short film challenge. He had previously participated in a 48-hour challenge and had a slight idea of what to expect. With the efforts of Jeysan, Teddy Chau, and Piratheep Ketharampillai, the team brainstormed ideas they thought would fit a potential topic that would be assigned to all teams participating in the competition on Friday, February 11, 2012.

Upon arrival of the check in point, they realized that nothing would have prepared them for the challenges that were to come in the next few hours. With equipment on hand the team headed west on the subway, aiming to film a 10-minute short film that captured a representation of Toronto in a cinematic genre. The team had actors on hand but ended up jumping into scenes themselves as needed. ‘We all had to look after each others jobs, because all we had was 24 hours’, director Jeysan says of his team who were extremely resourceful, aware of the time pressure.

Only after riding the entire green line of the TTC did the boys realize that they had just rode the last train and they’d have to improvise their story and quickly. The scenes then changed to the TTC bus, which was filled to capacity due to the snowfall that night. However the team didn’t lose faith. Slightly delirious by this point, the team wrapped up but were trapped in the city’s west end with no way to get back to the east end. At this point they had 8 hours left for post-production and luckily they made it through with a little help from some friends.

“Metro” was created to tell a realistic story of Toronto, focusing on the stories that people don’t talk about. Multiculturalism,  changes, and failure to adapt are the universal themes that the story lines focus on. The title refers to the train system, which can be seen as the vein of a city, a common denominator that connects all those who live here. For this reason, the scenes shot on the TTC were crucial to this film.

‘We were all doing everything, half way through it was like get in here, get in that scene,’ Adithya said about his experience. He went in as part of the team but ended up in front of the camera instead, acting as one of the main characters of one of the stories. When comparing the filming experience to the wedding experience, the team all agreed that working with weddings had prepared them for the film challenge due to the demanding environments they can present. However they enjoyed the film process due to the endless creativity it allowed.

Having overcome numerous challenges including  bad weather, a lack of time, failed equipment (half of the audio was missing which was only discovered during post production), and last minute changes, “Metro” will be screened at the T24 Film Festival on March 1^st, 2012 at Innis Town Hall, University of Toronto. It has been rated #1 out of the 12 films submitted.

Check out Atrium Pictures’ website for more info about the company and their projects.

—Ann Jaimi Alexander