Eli Smart knew from a young age he wanted to be a filmmaker. Unlike many others, Smart’s chance to test the waters with his big dream came in his teens, when he was given the opportunity to produce a film.
Homeschooled by his mother in Calgary, Smart’s world was small as a child. His life revolved around his family, neighbours and the kids on his block. He found himself drawn into the larger-than-life worlds of the comic books he read.
“When you’re a kid and looking at it, it’s just like, ‘Whoa, there’s a guy who can fly in the air and punch things really hard.’ That’s like the coolest thing ever for my three-year-old brain,” Smart says.
From comics to scriptwriting
These sensational stories inspired Smart to create his own. Throwing together drawings, creating worlds with his friends out of the things they liked, he would sell his amateur comic books to his neighbours for toonies. According to his mother, Sandy Smart, at home his imagination was even wilder.
“He had a very vivid imagination, and was always creating stories,” she says. “He and his sister are twins and so they had a very, very rich make-believe world that they developed for many, many years.”
Smart’s enthusiasm for storytelling eventually pushed his mother to place him in writing programs at the Alexandra Writer’s Center Society. In the beginning, ironically, Smart was not the most eager child.
Kim Firmston, Smart’s decade-long writing mentor, remembers his lack of excitement at nine very well.
“I think his first meeting he said, ‘I’m bored!’,” Firmston says.
However, as Smart matured under Firmston’s mentorship and learned from various writing programs, the craft of writing became more fascinating to him.
Through exploration, Smart found a passion for film storytelling and filmmaking. From writing to directing, music, lighting and cinematography. Smart fell in love with the flexibility and range of storytelling in film.
“It always went back to the writing of it, screenplay writing. That was the first thing I learned,” Smart says. “And then just from there, the other ways of storytelling you can do in film… how everything there can be used and has to be really, really specific to tell the story that you want to tell. Yeah, it’s incredible.”
With practice, he developed his niche in script writing.
Smart entertained dreams of making Marvel movies when he was 12, but the possibility of actually pursuing filmmaking at this time in his life was only a prospect for him. Until it wasn’t.
A budding filmmaker
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Smart, only 15, was approached by Firmston to pitch an idea for a $20,000 Telus Storyhive film grant. Knowing Smart and his ambitions, Firmston hoped he would pursue it.
Smart dived headfirst into the project. He convinced Firmston and Caelan Bell, a fellow film kid at the society, to join him as producer and co-director. Then the three set to planning a documentary about Calgarians’ adaptations to COVID-19’s disruptions.
The application process was stressful. The pitch alone took 12 hours to organize and Smart’s team faced hiccups along the way. But it was really only after they’d received the grant that things got truly difficult for Smart, Firmston and Bell.
They now had to make a movie — a task made all the more difficult by ongoing pandemic restrictions. For Smart, Firmston and Bell, inexperienced as they were, creating Adaptation in the Impoverished City was a huge challenge. Yet, for Smart especially, his abstract ideas about filmmaking were forced to come against the concrete realities of production.
“It was basically like a little film school before going to film school. It was trial by fire,” Smart says.
Adaptation in the Impoverished City involved long days, long meetings, collaboration, communication barriers, editing and much more that Smart had not anticipated at such a young age. The experience was difficult and filled with mistakes, but this chance to face his ambitions drove Smart to commit to following his dreams. For him, the people and the product made it worthwhile.
“It’d be a 12-hour day. It’d be super late out. I’d have to take the bus home,” Smart says. “But I’m like, ‘This is like the best thing ever, actually.’ I want to keep doing this because you get to hang out with friends and make something.”
Now, after two years of film school at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and with multiple films to his name, Smart is a Calgary filmmaker–like he always intended to be. Going forward, he hopes to push boundaries in his storytelling and make people feel, but most of all, he hopes to continue making movies with passionate people.
“At the end of the day, as long as I am making things with people I love and doing things I love, I’m happy.”