Short Film Diary - Week 6...

Last week was a busy one. I decided to make this short film because the feature projects I had in development didn't seem to be going anywhere. Now two of them have picked up some speed again and I had meetings about both last week. Which means I've been trying to get my head around three different projects - if this short film ends up featuring ninjas and bear traps you'll know that I've mixed up all three projects somewhere along the way.

This week was mostly taken up with finishing off the storyboard which is now done and my ongoing quest to find dancers.

Trying to get dancers for the film has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. In fact, I don't know why I ever thought it would be easy. Maybe because we were really just looking for people with some enthusiasm who are free for rehearsals and on the shooting dates. Our requirements aren't as specific as they were with actors. Finding people has been a problem, and then when we have found them working around 6 different peoples' schedules has been a bit of a nightmare, especially when it's unpaid. Time is also becoming an issue and by the time we got to meet some of the dancers for the first time we were past the point of auditions and onto the first rehearsal.

Luckily Brother Tim who's choreographing the dance sequence has taken over and managed to have the first successful rehearsal on Sunday. With less than two weeks to go until we shoot we've decided to down-size it from 6 dancers to 4 dancers but otherwise it's looking like it might actually work out.

Now the storyboard is finished I'm starting to work on a shot list which is also a much bigger job than I thought it would be. It's useful though and it's helped to work out exactly how we're going to shoot the film and how we're going to schedule it.

Next weekend we're doing our first full rehearsal which I'm hoping goes to plan. So far my attempts to get everyone involved in the production in the same place at the same time haven't quite worked out but if we pull it off on Sunday I'll feel a lot better about the shoot. Generally though things are going pretty well. The way I tend to judge how prepared I am is by thinking that if for some reason I had to shoot the whole thing tomorrow, would that be possible? At the moment I think it actually it would be possible which is a good sign.

We also did some test shots for the effects in the film which were surprisingly easy to do in the end and came out really well. I was going to post the video on here, but that felt a bit like letting the audience peek behind the curtain before the magic trick has even been done. Which makes it sound like an effects-filled extravaganza, like Avatar or something. It's not Avatar, but there will be some cool tricks in there.

What I will post is a video of Brother Pete amputating the monkey's paw. He is now cursed forever.