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Publicity & Distribution
Alejandro Adams, director
alejandro@braintrustdv.com

Specifications
24P NTSC Digital Video (Standard Definition)
96 minutes
U.S.A.


One-Line Synopsis
When a wealthy businessman loses his job and his girlfriend on the same day, he asks his estranged college-aged daughter to live with him temporarily and care for his young son from a failed second marriage.

Short Synopsis
When he loses his job and his girlfriend on the same day, a wealthy businessman is left to care for a young son he hardly knows. After spending a few weeks as an unwilling stay-at-home dad, he calls his estranged college-aged daughter and asks her to live with him and care for the boy until he gets back on his feet. Directionless and looking for a free ride, his daughter accepts this awkward proposition, but neither of them anticipates how this "solution" will affect the young boy. Soon the ex-girlfriend insinuates herself into this makeshift family, pushing the daughter away from her father before they can come to terms with their past and make sense of their chaotic present.

Long Synopsis
When Wyatt, a wealthy businessman, loses his job and his girlfriend on the same day, he is forced into the role of stay-at-home dad, though his five-year-old son Noah seems to be the one in charge. Noah keeps to himself, climbing trees and playing in the swimming pool which he maintains. Wyatt soon calls Daisy, his estranged college-aged daughter from a failed early marriage, and asks her to live with him and care for Noah until he gets back on his feet. When Daisy unexpectedly agrees, Wyatt quickly turns her arrival to his advantage: his ex-girlfriend Noreen immediately challenges Daisy's right to be a part of the family. Daisy plays mother to Noah with varying degrees of success, until his boyish ferocity wears her down and she begins to ignore him, seeking solitude in the guesthouse and idling by the pool. Daisy seems lost in her father’s world, unaccustomed to his privileged lifestyle. As her life takes on a wistful, dream-like quality, reconciliation between father and daughter seems even less likely than it did from a distance. Eventually Daisy meets an older Russian teacher who takes an interest in her, flattering her intellectual ability and providing a necessary relief from her circumstances. As Daisy gains confidence she begins to assert herself, putting Noah on a soccer team and urging her father to take more responsibility for himself. After witnessing Noah's increased hostility and enduring self-righteous lectures from his daughter, Wyatt enlists the help of Noreen, who pushes Daisy away from Wyatt and Noah before any of them have a chance to make sense of their chaotic lives.

Around the Bay is set in a village nestled in the foothills of the San Francisco Bay Area. By turns contemplative, darkly funny, and visually arresting, this domestic drama features dynamic performances by Steve Voldseth (Wyatt) and Katherine Celio (Daisy), while Connor Maselli (Noah) provides a sustained spectacle of unbridled boyhood.


Critical Quotes
"I thoroughly enjoyed Around the Bay...the camerawork, the stylistic choices, the whole look of the film. It was poignant and engrossing. [The director has] pulled off something difficult, a chamber drama in the sunshine. [Around the Bay is] a very fine film, which stays with me." -- Phillip Lopate

"It really drew me in. I was moved. It is a deeply humanistic film. It has a power. There is a clarity to the proceedings that's hard to define, but that lodges the film in your brain. The film's ending...is as powerful as any moment on film I've seen in recent years." -- Nick Rombes, Digital Poetics

"The visual storytelling was terrific shot-to-shot. The photography was uniformly excellent. There's a delightful interplay between narrative clarity and ambiguity. It makes for very challenging, almost confrontational, viewing." -- Brian Darr, Hell on Frisco Bay


Production Details
Around the Bay began when director Alejandro Adams adapted an incomplete piece of short fiction into disconnected script elements, believing that the story resisted prose and might be better conveyed visually. The original story had been written without insight into the characters' motivations and without a sense that any character among the three (Wyatt, Daisy, Noah) was the protagonist, that one character's desires or conflicts would take precedence over the others'. In undertaking a cinematic adaptation, Adams hoped to preserve this structural monotone.

The casting process was quick, as Adams saw very few actors for each role. He sensed in advance which person would be right for each part, judging from headshots and resumes. Thus, nearly every role was unofficially cast before the audition took place. In two cases, Adams cast main roles without seeing more than a single actor for the role.

The cast developed their characters before production began, through character meetings and email correspondence with Adams. None of the actors ever saw a script. Each week they received a call sheet with a list of scenes and some suggested dialogue which they were urged not to memorize. In some cases, one of the actors in a given scene would perform something which had been discussed in a character meeting with the director, while another cast member in the same scene was unaware of the nature of the scene. On at least one occasion, separate plot lines intersected and characters from each plot line who were supposed to be meeting each other for the first time in the story were being portrayed by actors who also were meeting each other for the first time--they introduced themselves with cameras rolling. These techniques facilitated a palpable vitality but also created some unforeseen tension.

Each scene developed from a firm, pre-conceived structure around which the actors improvised liberally--nothing about the characters or conflicts was left to the realm of improvisation. Though the actors understood their characters' motivations and attitudes from moment to moment, they were not provided backstory (other than what they developed as part of their private process), and they had no idea what their character would do in subsequent scenes--i.e., none of the actors had any sense of their characters "in time." By shooting all scenes in chronological order, the characters were developed in real time, accruing a collective backstory, often in long takes which Adams knew were superfluous to the movie itself but necessary for the actors to achieve a certain depth in their characterizations.

The look of Around the Bay was created by a team approach to cinematography: three or four qualified camera operators "improvised" while running three cameras simultaneously. The cameras were cleaned and white balanced before each scene, and then the shooters would quickly confer about exposure before rolling. The camera operators usually did not know what they were going to be shooting--they took their assigned positions and followed the action that unfolded, sometimes shooting half-hour takes without interruption. In many cases, exposures were changed in the middle of a scene, when one of the camera operators would note that the light was changing. Rarely was the scene stopped for technical changes to be implemented--the actors remained in the moment, and the camera operators learned to make adjustments on the fly as if shooting a documentary in a war zone. The multiple-camera approach allowed for an extremely efficient production, as close-ups, reverses and masters could be covered simultaneously, completely removing the need for traditional "coverage." The camera operators were instructed to roll the cameras during downtime as well, resulting in ample footage of the actors simply "being" without any sense of "performing." Much of this ancillary footage appears in the final cut.

Shooting half-hour takes created some challenges to recording production audio. On the first day, the boom operator was unable to hold the boom steady for the length of a take, and extensive boom handling noise had to be removed from those tracks during the sound editing stage. As production continued, the sound team discovered ways to circumvent the problems presented by long takes. A stationary boom with an omni-directional microphone was used in conjunction with several wireless lavalier microphones placed on the actors--although taping a wireless microphone to an active five-year-old boy might not qualify as a "solution." Often one of the sound crew would boom the scene manually as well, in order to provide as much coverage as possible. In the end, as with most low-budget independent productions, sound recording presented more challenges than any other aspect of production and sound editing required many rounds of intense focus from the editors.

Production began on September 9, 2006 in Los Gatos, California, and wrapped on November 17. The first assembly was completed on January 26, 2007, with a running time of three hours and forty-five minutes. The 96-minute final cut was completed in late October, 2007. Running three cameras simultaneously resulted in 65 hours of footage. With a total running time of 96 minutes, Around the Bay has a shooting ratio of roughly 40:1.


Actor Bio: Steve Voldseth (Wyatt)
If you're looking for proof that it's never to late to realize one's dreams, you need look no further than actor/writer/tax accountant Steve Voldseth. Before landing roles such as Wyatt in Around the Bay, Steve had already experienced some later-in-life success as a freelance comedy writer with credits that include Jay Leno, Craig Kilborn, Tina Fey and the syndicated comic strip, Dennis the Menace. At the age of 45, Steve took the advice of a UCLA screenwriting instructor and decided to explore a lifelong interest in acting by taking classes at Mission College. Those classes led to roles in a couple of local stage productions and more classes. And then at an age when most people are beginning to think about retirement, Steve landed a San Francisco agent and within two years built an acting resume that includes more than a dozen film roles.

Actor Bio: Katherine Celio (Daisy)
Though she was shy as a child, Katherine Celio always dreamed of performing. Home schooled at a young age, she was given the time to explore her creative side, often putting on plays with friends and performing in front of relatives. Katherine's dreams faded in high school, but a trip to Europe cleared her head. Upon her return to California, she asked her brother, who had just received a new camera for his birthday, to take her head shot, while her mother and sister set up the lighting equipment. Then she looked through the talent postings on craigslist, where she found an independent film titled Around the Bay.

In a life-imitates-art post-script to the production of Around the Bay, Katherine began dating an older Russian man, mirroring the development of her Daisy character in the movie.

Actor Bio: Connor Maselli (Noah)
At six years old, Connor has a resume lined with appearances on magazine covers, department store walls, billboards, commercials, and movie credits; however, his free time is far from limited to this arena. Connor is proud of his work in modeling and acting, but still prefers to identify himself as a "surfer dude." Never mind that he owns two surfboards and slaps on a wetsuit to brave the cold waves in Capitola, he will instead point to the fact that he has the hair for it as the deciding factor. He also races around the field as a forward in soccer, and recently started up a season of flag football. He boasts that he has finally learned how to "bust a method air" on a snowboard, and he goes by the nickname "Chain" in karate, where he holds an orange belt. He may not be able to define it, but Connor understands that nobody can bring what he can bring to a role. When asked why he thinks he will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he replies without hesitation, "Because I am the best, I just will. Because they always pick me!"

Actor Bio: Katherine Darling (Noreen)
Katherine Darling has pursued her passions for singing and acting since she was a little girl in Madison, Wisconsin. After earning her degree in Theatre Performance from the University of Minnesota, Katherine had the pleasure of working on a variety of stage and film projects in the Bay Area. Her career seemed on the rise until she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2004. After treatment it became clear that it would take much longer to fully heal her body as well as her mind and she feared her acting career would never regain the momentum it previously had. Around the Bay is one of a few special projects which seemed to find Katherine before she had regained the confidence necessary to seek out work for herself. She is grateful for the experience she had filming Around the Bay and now she moves forward with her craft, more determined than ever.

Actor Bio: Michael Umansky (Aleksey)
A native of Russia, Michael arrived on U.S. soil in January of 1974 and has been a happy San Francisco resident ever since. For years he put his analytical mind to work in Silicon Valley before recently discovering that he had a creative side. Michael believes in leading by example, so while trying to entice his four kids to pursue more creative (and possibly lucrative) hobbies, he decided to plunge head-on into the acting world himself. He was irrevocably hooked. Braving countless auditions, Michael managed to land several small roles before being cast as Aleksey in Around the Bay, his best role to date. This eye-opening experience led to other serious acting gigs, including a leading role in an environmentally apocalyptic sci-fi short currently in production. Michael is slowly building his resume with projects in Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Director's Statement: Alejandro Adams
In the year I spent editing Around the Bay, three major events occurred: my wife gave birth to our second child; we bought our first home and moved in; and two of our laptops were stolen, resulting in the loss 75% of my creative life--short fiction, correspondence, essays, scripts, music, website files and images. To be honest, I don't remember editing Around the Bay, since these milestones and setbacks so thoroughly upstaged it. Rapturous over the birth of my son, dizzy at the price of our little condo and the challenge of moving with two small children under foot, and beleaguered by the loss of momentum and morale associated with the theft of the laptops, I was largely unable to focus on editing this movie. I think it's safe to say that the completion of Around the Bay--or, rather, its very existence--is nothing short of a miracle. In a year so rich with event, with so many things vying for a primary position in my mind, I'm not surprised that the entire year feels like a long blackout.

Stills for Print (Right-click and select "save link as" to download.)

Cast: Wyatt (Steve Voldseth) considers his options after losing his job in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Noah (Connor Maselli) waits by the window in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Daisy (Katherine Celio) travels by train in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Noah (Connor Maselli) spends time in the pool in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Daisy (Katherine Celio) relaxes in the pool in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Wyatt (Steve Voldseth) confesses his sins in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Noah (Connor Maselli) attacks his sister Daisy (Katherine Celio) in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Alejandro Adams.

Cast: Daisy (Katherine Celio) hides in the guesthouse in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Samuel Lopez.

Cast: Wyatt (Steve Voldseth) keeps his distance from guests during the harvest party in Around the Bay. Dir. Alejandro Adams. Image courtesy of Samuel Lopez.