TLI director Mick Soiza’s short film “The Best is Yet to Come” launched today on Filmshortage.com. A fitting name for the film and the director as it showcases Mick’s unique and intimate voice, a skill set that excites us.
If better is yet to come, this is an incredible start.
“The Best is Yet to Come” reinterprets the symbols of passion, persistence and fragility of an athlete as a human being. It explores the never-ending pursuit for greatness and ultimately how we must connect with both our past and present experiences to successfully move forward.
Link: https://filmshortage.com/shorts/the-best-is-yet-to-come/
TBIYTC Synopsis:
Injured dancer, Ella, is consumed by her desire to be prepared for an upcoming performance. Forgoing rest and convalescence, she pushes through physical pain and mental exhaustion to perfect her routine. In doing so, she leads a solitary existence, where nothing can deter her from being the best she can be.
In Mick’s own words…
I wanted to take a look into ballet and dancing and I remembered one of my friends had danced professionally a while back and was stunned to see so much grace in her craft so I decided to make a short with her. I was kind of struggling with my own craft, like finding time and putting energy into it personal projects and I wanted to show, that behind every form of art there’s a lot of work and the most visual way to portray that could be in a dancer. It follows her journey, the day to day struggles of a dancer but more so the mental strain dances have to deal with one a day to day basis.
This is my first narrative personal project, I had everything in mind. I wrote a brief story about Midori (actress) a list of scenes to shoot and ended up storyboarding the whole thing because I didn’t have a budget but had time. Essentially, this project is about the athletes’ struggle – I love films that focus on the artist’s or athlete’s struggle as it is so inspiring and terrifying at the same time to be immersed in their journey. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of overnight success and how suddenly everyone knows any artist’s or athlete’s name when they have been working every day for their entire lives to achieve this moment but the question is, do we ever reach that moment? Or is the best yet to come? I feel this piece tries to encapsulate that.
Midori is the main actress and a friend, she is a former ballerina with The Houston Ballet and has always had a huge love for dance and music. She trained at The Australian Ballet School in Melbourne, graduating with an Advanced Diploma of Dance in 2007 and attained a contract with Houston Ballet soon after graduation until 2010. Currently, she loves that she can teach her passion for Ballet, Pilates and Yoga to adults and children.
Sean and I self-funded the project, the film was shot over 2 days and as this was a love project it took around a month and a half in post allowing us to work it around other projects. We shot on RED with some Old Super Balters lenses, and minimal lighting – I think the combination is a bit more atmospheric. Sean and I wanted to soften the images a lot more with some vintage lens, haze and Sean did a killer job. The score and sounds designed was composed by Jonny Higgins, a super talented composer based out of Sydney, he was on board with the idea and pretty much flipped the track on its head – originally we were going to go something more guitar driven and minimalistic but Jonny hit me with a couple of synths and things went 80’s pretty quickly. I feel like it is something unexpected and not traditional to most dance films.
Over the past 12 months, Mick has gone from directing with a boutique production company, getting a few commercials under his belt, being nominated for best direction in a music video at the Directors Guild to now being signed with Brisbane based production company Two Little Indians.
