Courses and scripts

The wheels are uncharacteristically spinning on my next project, seeing that I've completed the screenplay on time, and had a talk with the guy who's agreed to be my DOP (Director of Photography) and Gaffer (lighting). I've even got all the locations down pat (which is a grand total of 5). Strangely, everything's not a cataclismic failure thus far.

I had the first production class on Friday; I can tell right away that it'll be an intense course that'll basically get me the basics of what I need to know. And shock! surprise! the first thing I learn is writing a script/storyboard.

But I'll back it up a second.

My teacher is a guy that's done a bunch of work in commercials/tv/actually established projects. I caught wind that he'd checked over a ton of students' scripts and critiqued them; so naturally, I handed off my script to him to check over. I'm sure he'll rip it apart, which I want, so it'll likely end up being something entirely different then I started with. Which I'm cool with, since there was things I liked, and didn't like about what I currently had.

The equipment I'll be using is a 5000 dollar camera, but alas, still in DV-format as opposed to actual film, which would otherwise be 16mm. Course, I don't have the coin available for 500 dollars worth of reel, otherwise I'd hit that up immediately.

My DOP/Gaffer has done a ton of work, both paid and unpaid, across Southern Ontario for some time, which includes work for the Canadian Film Board. I've also seen some of the films he's done, and while very anti-Hollywood, he's also ridiculously knowledgeable about the actual process, and damn good. It's nice to know that I won't really have to worry about that side of the film, because he's got his shit together there.

For now, I'll have to leave it at that. I've still got a ton of pre-production to do, next of which will start tonight with the shot breakdown. That's easy; just tedious to actually do. But there the film will really start to flesh out - being that I'm more an artist than a storyteller (dialogue was one of the things I didn't like about my script), I'll likely tell the story more through this method. We start shooting in early October, so I've got a tight deadline to do all my pre-production.

And I promise soon I'll put up some visual content for the film.

-Mark