From Seven Days Vermont (www.7dvt.com)
State of the Arts
BY MARGOT HARRISON [05.26.10]

One day, Brattleboro-based filmmaker Morgan Faust was reading the New Yorker when she noticed an ad that read, “Do you need to buy some time?” She remembers thinking, What if you could buy time? Fun time or alone time? If you could buy it by the quality, not just the quantity?

Those questions inspired “Tick Tock Time Emporium,” a short film that Faust and a crew of 25 will shoot in Bellows Falls this July. Faust, 32, describes it as a “Tim Burton-meets-Amélie-style film … about a little girl who finds herself in a fantastical time shop, where time can be bought and sold.”

Faust, a Boston native who’s splitting her time between Vermont and her MFA program at Columbia, has plenty of experience behind the scenes. She produced Bess O’Brien’s film version of Shout It Out! in 2008 and has been involved with the naturalistic, ultra-low-budget filmmaking movement critics call “mumblecore”: She produced director Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation and associate-produced Funny Ha Ha.

More recently, Faust edited the indie film 3 Backyards, with Edie Falco, which was well received at Sundance. She’s cast another of that film’s stars, Broadway actress Rachel Resheff, as the heroine of “Tick Tock.”

Faust says when she saw Adams Grist Mill in Bellows Falls, she realized it was “exactly what I imagined for the film” and contacted the local historical society about filming there. The Vermont shoot is scheduled to take about six days; the 15-minute film has a projected budget of $22,000.

That may seem low for a fantasy. But Faust hopes to “use colors and light to bring out that fantastical look,” she says. Though she’s working with a visual-effects team, she adds, “we’re trying to make as much of it as possible really exist.” That means delving into the historical society’s trove of “old machines and devices and cameras.” Faust and her brother, a production designer, are repurposing the quaint-looking objects as props. For instance, she says, “something that looks like an old camera could be something you could use to monitor how much time you’re wasting.”

Like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, the film’s young heroine feels her mom never has enough time for her, but when she tries to pilfer some from the Time Emporium, untoward consequences ensue. The lesson, says Faust: “You can’t really control what someone else does with time.”