Marculations

I worked up a preliminary schedule for principal photography. It’s only four days — one day on location in Palm Beach County, one day of shooting inside the apartment, one day of shooting outside the apartment, and an additional day for pick-ups. The times are going to be a killer — right now, it’s set for 9:30pm to 3:30am the day we shoot the interior. That’s optimistic, too. I’m sure I’ll be playing with that a lot more as we get closer to shooting.

The rehearsal schedule will be more realistically based on the needs of the people needing to be rehearsed. The photography schedule is based on my needs. Muahahahah.

The microphones and camera stabilizer are here. We checked everything out and it’s all gravy. We’re short some wires and a shock mount, though. Just a few more small pieces to get, which I can probably get locally.

The new revision of the script is working out much better than the previous revision; getting much more positive feedback from it.

As for locations, we’ve finally settled on “somewhere in Palm Beach County” for the exterior scenes, and our place here in Fort Lauderdale for the rest. I’ve got to get up to West Palm tomorrow or Friday and scout a more specific spot.

I sat down tonight and revised the script. It’s a process that takes many weeks to brainstorm, and about thirty minutes to actually sit down and do.

I have to force myself to go for weeks or even as much as a month, without reading the script. Once I finally sit down and go over it, I can easily see a slew of problems with it. It might be that I’m in a different frame of mind than I was when I wrote it, or it might just be things need revising, but either way, lots of changes get made.

So, finally, after having a glimmer of the idea in January of 2005, writing the treatment in April, having an explosive and influential fight with my then-girlfriend in September which spawned the first draft, and doing pre-production off and on through October and November, I have the coveted “revision two”. It’ll most likely go through a tweaky revision three before being stamped as the shooting script, but this is basically it.

Glidecam stabilizer is on the way. Storyboarded the shots and did a little work on set design. Scouted around and pared down the list of exterior locations to three. Any of them will work great.

The new microphones are on their way.

A studio microphone for looping, a new shotgun microphone more suited to film production, and a clip-on lavalier microphone for good measure.

With the equipment on the way and the character synopses put together, pre-production is hopefully going to finish up very soon. Just got to take care of that pesky casting, and maybe a couple storyboards.

We’ve started the wheels turning on the casting process for the female lead in The Last Regret. A few people have been contacted so far, and I hope to get a couple few more. The general hope is to get at least 4-5 people to audition for the part, but if we can get more, that’ll be even better. I’ll have people read this part until the end of time if I can.

I hate casting. Fuck.

On to audio. We secured a mixer today, and another set of monitor headphones. The hope is to mix on-body microphones with boom microphones, as opposed to capturing everything solely on the boom microphone. We’re taking it up a notch, people.

Oh lord.

Most video is shot at 60 interlaced frames per second.

It looks terrible. I hate that look. Nothing I shoot will be presented in that form ever again. (Well, not narrative film, anyway. The video look has its place.)

We’ll be shooting The Last Regret on a Panasonic DVX100A. It records in NTSC DV, which is 60 interlaced frames per second. However, it can shoot in 24p 2:3:3:2 Advanced, which is a way of storing 24 frames per second data on DV. It takes some additional post-processing work, and the tapes can’t be played back straight to a monitor without first converting the footage, but it allows you to perform the edit directly in 24p without any further hassle.

I hate spending money.

I pretend to love it, but secretly, I really, really don’t.

This shopping, though, is necessary. It’s all the equipment and props needed for our next short, The Last Regret.

Pre-production on this short is taking forever. It was supposed to be done already. Not pre-production, the entire short. Between moving to Ft. Lauderdale, running from Hurricane Wilma and, let’s say, “waiting for funds to be available”, it’s taking a lot longer than it should be.

As a nice glimpse into some of the pre-production work for this short, here’s my shopping list.

• 24 Carrots
• 8 Red Candles (long stick)
• 2 wooden salad bowls
• Fixings for 4 salads
• Kitchen knife
• Briefcase
• Prop gun (BB gun?)
• Trashcan
• 3 JVC Pro MiniDV cassettes
• Audio-Technica AT4073a microphone
• Shock mount for AT4073a
• Wind cut for AT4073a
• Dry erase production slate
• Dry erase markers
• Gaffer tape

Looking over the list, I suppose I’m going to need to budget myself. The props themselves shouldn’t be more than $100. The tapes will be $30. The microphone is around $600, the shock mount is another $50 and the wind cut is $50-100. Let’s lock the budget at $1200, give everybody points and no money on the front end, and that leaves us with enough money to shoot for 2-3 days while being able to feed the cast and crew.

We talked about shopping. I’m on a roll, here. Let’s go into the whole pre-production smatter.

Locations.

Location scouting is a real pain in the ass. Once you’ve done it a couple times, your brain is permanently fixed in that mode. Everywhere you go becomes a potential location for a shot. As far as this script goes, I know a couple places in Ft. Lauderdale that will be great. Locations aren’t a big deal.

Permits. In a city like this, you need a permit to film. You don’t want to deal with the hassle of getting thrown off of your location. I’ve already got the number to call to secure a filming permit. It also adds an aire of legitimacy to your production — the city publishes a list of productions that are permitted to shoot, the locations they are allowed in, and the length of time they are permitted to shoot for. Any would-be cast or crew that are suspect of your project can see that you have secured the proper permits.

On to camera mountings and equipment.

There’s a dolly shot in this. We need a dolly, a dolly operator, and a grip who can wrangle the equipment. We’ve got a hook-up for all of that, though, so it’s no big deal. As far as tripods go, we need a bigger and more sturdy one. That’s not in the budget. If we can’t borrow or steal one, that won’t happen.

Lighting. Ugh. I don’t want to talk about lighting right now.

Casting is going to take place soon. All of this needs to be ready to go by the time we finish casting, or at least planned somewhat, so a no-shit schedule can be given to whoever gets cast.

What a bitch.