The story of Ghost River Theatre’s artistic director’s life-altering moment of being struck by lightning is taking the jump from the theatre stage to the silver screen.

Struck, which premiered at the West Village Theatre at the end of January, was already heavily using special effects and video elements to bring Eric Rose’s experience to life.

So natural was that fit between the theatre production and the live video work that it became obvious to Rose to make the jump to a full indie film production.

“Over the last season ended up kind of branching out into a kind of more film, TV kind of orientated thing, because we over the summer shot this limited streaming series called So Dark the Sky, with North Country Cinema,” Rose said.

“It’s really about what film does so well. So instead of focusing on what the theatrical production did in many ways, it’s like, what can the camera capture differently, more uniquely, or more intimately,” said Rose.

Matthew McKinney, who served as the cinematographer and camera operator for the live theatre production, joined Rose as the co-director and Director of Photography for the film version of Struck.

“It was kind of nice to be able to see him, take what we did in the kind of theatrical format, and then devise something that would work from a film point of view. It’s been quite exciting to see how the story takes shape differently in a different medium. It’s very rare that you get that opportunity,” said Rose.

Filming was completed in December after several months of shoots that took place in Calgary and in Delburne.

Rose said he’s hoping to do a showing first of a cut for people who attended Struck on stage, followed by a more general showing for the public at one of the independent cinemas in the city.

“I would love to submit it to CIFF, which would be lovely to have it there, and then hopefully from there we would submit it to a bunch of other film festivals and see what happens.”

The film had a modest indie budget of $25,000, but Rose said that it worked to the benefit of the film rather than against it.

“Restrictions are actually the seed of invention,” he said.

“When I watched the latest edit, it’s just amazing to me the quality of picture and what we’ve been able to achieve. It’s about that passion purpose. It’s about the spark. When you have artists and crafts, you can kind of make up for a lot of the fancy stuff.”

Adaptational changes make it a new experience, even for people who saw the play

Rose said that over the past year of production work on the film, a lot was discovered about how to re-tell Struck through a different medium.

“We’ve edited together a few different rough cuts and different versions, made some discoveries, and then realized what we needed was to go out and shoot outside of what we had already done,” he said.

Among those adaptational changes that took place was combining the clear two-act format of the stage production into a more personal inter-connected point of view story for the fictional Eric Rose.

The film also has a larger cast than the stage production, as Rose and McKinney found that the dual talents of Nathan Schmidt and Daniel Perryman to inhabit multiple roles effortlessly on stage during Struck didn’t translate as easily to film.

That double casting is especially prominent in the second half of the play, where Perryman played all of the supporting character roles as an older Rose, played by Schmidt, revisits the hometown he lived in when he was struck by lightning.

“This is a big discovery for us. The idea that the characters play multiple characters is much harder,” Rose said.

“All of a sudden in the second act, young Eric was playing all those characters in some ways as a metaphor to everything leading back to that moment, or that time in his life. It didn’t work at all. So we had to really chase a lot of that, and figure out some ways around that kind of double casting.”

The solution was to still put a great deal of focus on both Schmidt and Perryman, keeping the feel of the play alive, while using other actors sparingly when needed to fill those other roles.

That type of storytelling, said Rose, would still keep the important message about the point of view about various stages of life and of grief as poignant as it was on stage—and the conversation that it produced.

“What we’re trying to do is create this very clear idea of Eric’s telling the planet from the point of view of this thing outside of the theatre, but when we’re actually telling the story, he’s using the language of the theatre.”

For more details on Struck, see www.ghostrivertheatre.com/struck.