As a child, Jeremy Larter’s favourite pastime was watching people.
He made his observations while accompanying his mechanic father, Kent Larter, on errand runs to Charlottetown, York and Tracadie Harbour every weekend.
“At each stop we would watch him talk to another guy and then they’d go into a building. Meanwhile my brother and I would sit in the car and wait for him to come out.
“As the morning wore on he would continue to have conversations with other guys. And boy, they were long,” says the Covehead, P.E.I., native, with a laugh, during a telephone interview from Toronto.
As he matured, he continued to watch men conversing with other men.
“They would talk about everything or nothing for a very long periods of time. So I grew up thinking it was therapeutic to spout your perspective on something, whether or not you’ve thought very deeply about it,” says the P.E.I. native, who filed many of these images away in his head.
Recently, they came flooding back to him as the inspiration for Ponderings, a webseries he co-created with Islander Robbie Moses.
“Guys have great egos and therefore like to inflate the things that happen to them. They like to portray themselves as strong or brave. But when they’re in the situation they don’t always act with the same bravado. They like to relay a story that happened to them in a way that they wish they had behaved. That is the premise of the series.
“Having said that, my main goal is that people will get a laugh out of it,” says Larter, director for the series, which will launch its 22nd episode this week on the Internet. The videos convey a friendship between two unnamed men, played by Larter and Moses, in two minutes.
“It’s two guys having conversations that normal guys might have. We talk about girls, other guys and our vices,” says Moses, who wrote three of the episodes that are set in locations ranging from a beach and to a baseball diamond and hockey rink.
He enjoys the creative process.
“Often it would just be a basic outline until the day of shooting. Then, in between takes, we’d bounce ideas back and forth. Jeremy directed the videos so if he liked something I did he’d say, ‘use that.’
