Too Many Chores

Pre-production, as it turns out, is all about time management and task-prioritizing.

Here is a rough list of things I have to do right now, in no particular order:

1. Send several emails
2. Fill out insurance applications
3. Build a website for the film
4. Post things on the website
5. Record a video podcast. Every week.
6. Draw stick-figure storyboards for the entire film.
7. Do an inventory of the gear we have at our disposal
8. Get bios and photographs of the crew
9. Write sides to hand out at auditions
10. Make the production schedule
11. Read two books on directing actors
12. Watch several movies for inspiration
13. This blog post
14. About 20 more things I can’t remember right now.

Figuring out which of those things to spend my time on is probably the biggest challenge. Nearly all of them are easy to do, or at least close. That’s not the problem.

Cheap, fast or good. You can have any two of those three.

I’m trying to leave out “fast,” but even that is turning out to be hard.

Breaking Down

I had a phone call today with the Director of Special Events at Grace College, my alma mater, which owns a hotel I’m hoping to use to shoot my first feature this year.

He wants to meet with me next week to go over my proposed schedule with a view to seeing whether he can accommodate me. He wants to see it in detail, by room, because he frequently rents the space piecemeal, so he needs to know exactly which days I need which rooms.

Thing is … I don’t have a schedule.

See, the whole movie takes place in this location. I figured I would lock the location first, then make the schedule for how I use the location. Silly me; that’s not how things work.

So I have to do a script breakdown this week. For any non-entertainment-biz visitors, this is a document that tells you all the different resources you need to produce a particular script—props, locations, talent, costumes, etc.—and which days you need those things.

I’ve never done one of these. So that’s fun.

They have software to do this for you. And I love software. So I downloaded Celtx, which is a free scriptwriting/pre-production software application. I’ve never used it to write because I was lucky enough to start screenwriting when I could still use a student discount to purchase Final Draft, but Final Draft doesn’t do all the same things.

So here goes. I hope I don’t butcher it horribly.

P.S. I feel like I’ve finally come up with a good title for this script, so I’m going to share it here, and it is: Murder! A Love Story. I hope you like it.

The Indiana Film Showcase

This past Friday The Saint Regis Club hosted our first ever Indiana Film Showcase. I organized this event, so Thursday and Friday were busy, sleepless days.

We were showing three films in a row, all by Indiana-based filmmakers. Since you should check them all out, they were:

Finding Xanadu: The Life and Films of Samuel W. Truss by Benjamin Lancaster

Ghost Stories 4 by Dan T. Hall

Trippin’ by Devi Snively

A good time was had by all. Or most. We even had some people attend who were actually involved in the making of these films, and they were gracious enough to do short Q&As with us after the screenings.

This was in important event to me and The Saint Regis Club because we’re also planning on organizing a full-fledged, multi-day Film Festival with two capital Fs later this year. This was a microcosm of that, so it was good to see what the challenges and requirements would be. And among other things, I learned two primary lessons:

Lesson one: advertising. What I did for the Showcase failed miserably. Literally not a single person came because of advertising; it was all word of mouth. So I’ll have to regroup and rethink my strategies.

Lesson two: doing everything myself. Don’t. I felt like I was going to die from exhaustion, and this was just a short, one-day event.

But my next step is a grant application, due later this month. That I can do by myself.

Overdrive

Firstly, congratulations to my friend Greg, whose new short film, Wicked, received all its funding and then some. Hopefully he’ll finish it soon so we can all enjoy watching it.

But back to me. I’m finally done with my three weeks of training during the day and can start to have a normal sleep schedule. Meanwhile, I realized that those three weeks of relative non-productivity have set me behind where I was hoping to be with one of my projects the Saint Regis Indiana Film Showcase.

Tonight at work I wrote a press release, and tomorrow morning I’m going to be on the phone with all the local newspapers and radio stations attempting to promote the films we’ll be showing the first week in March.

All are by Indiana filmmakers, but I can’t come out and say what they are yet because I’m still a day (and hopefully no more) away from finalizing the program.

Then I have to design posters and figure out where to hang them. There should hopefully be other advertising as well, but I’m not sure how that’s going to look yet.

I really miss those three weeks.

Crawling Along

I’m finally starting to become productive again after the holidays. I won’t even go into all the various demands on my time that have kept me from making progress recently, but I’m starting to gain ground once more.

For one thing, my buddy Shawn is back in town after a month-long absence, so we’re getting together this weekend to work on our web series. Not sure where he is with the writing of his half of the episodes, but let’s hope … done.

On the other side of the page (as it were), the date of the Saint Regis Indiana Film Celebration (or whatever we end up calling it) is fast approaching, and I’ve finally managed to solicit more than one film to be in it. Even as I write this (hopefully), screener DVDs are making their way through the mail system to me. I’m hoping to have watched several more Indiana-based films by the end of next week and be very close to locking the program for the event.

This will mean it’s time to start publicity for the event, and not a second too early. I haven’t quite figured out how we’re going to advertise, but I’m going to start by calling the local paper to see if they want to do a story. This may involve writing a press release, which I haven’t done in a while, but I’m hoping they’ll bite on the concept of an interview with me and Dave Gustafson.

I really want this event to go well, as I think that would give us more confidence in planning our much more extensive (and frightening) film festival in September.

And for other reasons upon which I will not elaborate at present.

More as it happens.

Wicked

My friend Greg Francis just shot a short film based on the true story of a rape/attempted murder survivor.

He’s got a great cast and crew, and a fantastic script—I know because I read and gave notes on it. But he needs a little more money to pay for some of the unavoidable costs of film production—and possibly festival submission. So he’s started a Kickstarter project to try to raise \$2500 to finish the film.

Worth a look. Follow the link below to support Greg and Wicked.

Post-Holidays

As I rather expected, progress on all my endeavors slowed to virtually zero over the holidays. What with all the family activities and lack of sleep, I didn’t have much energy at work for anything but watching Family Guy on Netflix and using toothpicks to prop up my eyelids.

But I’m back this week, devouring feminist books and possibly starting to make notes about my next script. I just finished Promiscuities by Naomi Wolf, a book I’m convinced every parent of a female child in Northern America should read. It provided much raw fuel for the process of developing a story based around female sexuality, so I’m excited to butcher the topic as only a half-educated American male can.

Not that it matters to anyone but me and my wife, but I’m also super-psyched to finally be on what will (theoretically) be my regular schedule at work—four nights on and three off, a straight-up third-shift schedule all the way through the week—no more of this switching back and forth between day and night. I’m definitely getting to the age where regular sleep matters to my ability to think.

Research

The other day I went along with a friend to do some Christmas shopping (his, not mine), and we stopped at Half Price Books. I bought two books for eight bucks. So great.

One is The Chalice and the Blade, which from what I can tell by the synopsis is about male-female sexual dynamics throughout history. The other is Promiscuities, which follows the sexual coming of age of several young women across the world.

If you know me personally but don’t talk to me much about my writing career you might find this pretty odd, but it makes sense for two reasons. One is that I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing over here on the subject of female sexuality, and I’m starting to reach the limits of my ignorance.

But more importantly, since I’ve found that what I primarily write is romantic comedy, I, a man, need to learn a lot more about women fast. So I’m pretty excited about all this women’s studies reading I have coming at me.

Watch the Reel. Because.

Because it took me so long to figure out, that’s why.

This is how publishing your own website is. It takes you fifteen minutes to make some minor changes to your reel, then another two hours to figure out how to do HTML5 video while also supporting certain backward browsers built by companies who disdain plebeian things like innovation.

And don’t get me started on Ogg Theora.

Anyway, the reel is up; I hope you love it.

Edit: The Reel is now no more.