Me & My Producer

I'm kicking myself for not thinking about this the last time I wanted to do a feature film. Why didn't I get my girlfriend as the producer from the start? She's (a) hard working, (b) trustworthy and (c) very supportive. Makes sense.

Last night, instead of cuddling up and watching a movie we worked on the movie. Diana worked on our production schedule and master table, as I like to call it. The master table is an excel spreadsheet that states, in one shot, each scene, characters in the scene, location, props required, crew, shots and various other tid-bits. Diana took the original master table (which I did for the last movie) and re-layout-ed the thing to make a whole lot simpler.

Wonderful.

Whilst she worked on the PC, I worked on the storyboards. Ordinarily I don't storyboard with my short films, but since there are a LOT of shots in this movie (at a guess, there will be at least 300 shots in the movie, possibly 400) and because I'll be using multiple cameramen and D.O.P.'s it'd be good to have a frame of reference for everyone. Might upload some of the weirder boards one of these days.

But yes, the multiple cameramen. The shooting schedule's gonna be spread out over several weekends (going well into the fasting month and after it) and I can't get one single cameraman and D.O.P. who'll be available for every weekend till we get this movie in the can (or, in the case of our current digital wave, in the hard drive). So instead I'm getting a bunch of guys who'll be taking shifts. On some weekends, it might even end up with one cameraman going on till 3pm and another will take over till 7pm. Such is the world of low budget-ness.

Another issue about the movie came up over the weekend and that is the MVA's (Malaysian Video Awards). Apparently the call for entries is in mid-October, which means there is no way in hell my feature length's gonna make it in. I'm contemplating sending my past two short films but also tempted to shoot something over the next weekend, just to stick in the MVA's. If only I had an idea...

See, with the short films I'm usually testing a technique that I'm not sure about. With Nicotine I wanted to see whether I could do a voice over driven movie and also whether my colour-to-black & white fade worked. With Some Like It White I wanted to see how much I could control pacing and dialogue through the edit. There are a few techniques I want to test out for the feature film, I'm just not sure what kind of short film dramatic context I could wrap it around.

Grammar deteriorating. Must have cigarette.