And the planning continues, Relatively speaking…

One thing is for sure, there is a lot of decisions that have to be made, items procured, locations found, people to work with, concepts to come up with, and no end to the glue that sits between all these tangents to a film.  While I may have been rather quiet lately about the progress, it wasn’t for a lack of progress being made!

I am a person who likes details.  I want immersive settings.  I don’t like a set when I watch something that could easily be replaced with a thousand other sets because it totally doesn’t play off the story or the scene.  Not to say there isn’t a need for scenes without this level of connection, for a short film, I think it goes without saying that it should be a requirement.  To me, this separates a lot of work that I’ve seen.  If you are going to take me on a thirty minute ride, I want you to blow me away.

That said, I’ve rearranged our production schedule to allow for more detailed analysis into the scenes, and less multitasking so that all the people involved can really hone in on one details at a time.  The big picture is obviously important, but that is my job, as the story writer, and I am fine with that.

The biggest hurdle I was trying to hop over was concept art.  I can see everything in my head that I want to use as a starting point, but drawing it on paper then scanning it in is archaic.  I just refuse to go down that path.  So, I finally broke down and bought a WACOM tablet.  To say the least, wow, amazing.  I am still getting used to it, but for doing sketches of ideas, and being able to modify them quickly, this has REALLY sped up my processing.  Granted, I still use clips of images that are influences, especially with all the ideas Micah sent me recently, but this allows me to take other images and really go to town on modifying them to see what we are going to come up with.

The first machine has been prototyped and tomorrow I go over it with my DP, Micah Moore before we submit the idea to our prop construction man, Andrew Comstock.  While I am sure there will be mods, I finally got the idea out of my head which is good!

In addition to this, I’ve begun drawing pictures of the sets.  Not to set them in stone, but to influence my set scouts and also to provide Micah, who is doing storyboards, at least an idea of what was in my head and what coloring I was seeing (albiet very crude sketches for the rooms).  We’ll see how this works.

Finally, using excel I’ve begun putting together the huge prop list for the film so items can be procured as they are found and we can get this thing rolling!  We plan on coming up with a productions schedule for the first 1/3rd of the film after the prop designer gives us some estimates.  Which, hopefully, will be enough time for me to finish the lens system I built for the Canon HV30 (not far from being done) and finishing the follow focus as well.  We also need time for experimentation and we DEFINITELY need to work with a steadycam that will work for both the HV30 and the HVX (with adjustment of course).

On top of that, we are going to start working on casting the people and voices we need for the first two sets.  I am VERY excited about the next steps…