3 weeks to go, 9 million things to do.

It's been a little bit since I last blogged, yes. I've been working my ass off on the film, and as of this moment I've acheived a lot... for once.

I finalized the script after handing it to the script expert. Surprisingly, there was only a small change needed, which was made. Now the script is solid, and it was ready for public disclosure.

So I started working on the storyboard, which has been ridiculously tedious, and is still only about half-finished. Luckily, I can literally take this to about the day before shooting, which was decided on October 14th and 15th. The digital stills I've been taking is VERY time consuming, and using just stand-ins has proved to be a nightmarish annoyance, since they don't know what I'm doing. It's not a huge deal, since it's just a rough outline, but ugh. Talk about frustrating.

Moving along, I managed to pick up one actress - it wasn't difficult, given the 30 second conversation it took to acquire her. It also made it easier that she's one of my friends. And she's got such a huge role: The girlfriend. All she does is answer the door and look excited. No lines, and a grand total of maybe 3 shots. Genius.

However, I actually posted a casting call on Friday, and got a response - a guy from Barrie that's interested in playing. That's a hell of a drive, but hey, why not - it's just good to get that first response.

Course I'm now paranoid that it'll be the only response I get. I've already started to second guess my call for the female lead, since it wasn't particularly descriptive or really gives an accurate/appealing character to play.

What's most interesting for me is HOW much more there is to this than I predicted. Like most novice filmmakers, I just assume it goes script-drawings-shoot-edit-done. There's a ton of little inside work to do, and I'm still only about half-way through my pre-production. I've got to finish off getting my crew, get all the actors, all my extras (which arguably, will be the easiest part), have a crew meeting, hold auditions, get a shooting schedule, pray for good weather, pray for warm weather, set up all the locations, arrange for food, finish my storyboard, get all my equipment, and there's probably about 200 other things I'm forgetting.

Joy. And all this being done on a budget of zero dollars.

And let's not forget that I still have that whole "school" thing somewhere in there. But that can be ignored.

-Mark