Birthpains of a filmmaker.

So for the last 6 or so months, I've been toying with a new film idea. My last/first short film, titled The Sturnich Conspiracy, had a whole lot of flaws that pretty much caused it to fail miserably, most noteably the lighting. It was a damn shame, considering how much time and effort others I had aquired help from put into it. I made a ton of mistakes which ranged from no set direction, no script, no storyboard, no planning, pretty much no kind of consistent effort until the post-production stages, when I realized the film was a mess with some good points in it. I tried to cram a 30-40 minute story hopelessly into 11 minutes. As a result, the the main (and pretty much only) character stopped talking 5 minutes in, ran around for 6, and died kind of unexplainedly. The last minute of the film is pretty well shot, actually - about the only positive to take. Basically, with such a restricting timeline I threw out the entire subplot/catalist of the movie, so really it just looked like the character was weird/dumb/completely out of his mind.

Yeah. Messy.

But not all bad came from this. I took what I had learned, which most importantly was to PLAN a film out before shooting, and to get real actors to star instead of just my random friends (and myself).

I spent all summer planning and fleshing the plot out for my next attempt, which eventually came to the title of Wake Up. And before anything, I set dates for me to complete stages of the production. My last "deadline" to pass was the finishing of the screenplay, which I can thankfully say I've done (at least, the rough). In those stages, I worked on finding some help, and luckily for me, I picked up the same two guys that helped my post production in The Sturnich Conspiracy. That would be the graphics/visuals/titles guy, and a composer. Both of whom did excellent jobs on TSC, and frankly I'm a little surprised they agreed to come on for Wake Up. Anyhow, I'm meeting up with the graphics guy on Friday to discuss more of the film, and see where I'm sitting. And with classes starting in only a few days, and the hectic weekend (of moving) over, I can finally sit down, ignore all my other classes, and work on this film.

And yes, I'll post The Sturnich Conspiracy in a little bit, if anyone's interested in the "start" of LEGP.

-Mark