Three days 'til 'Action!'

I am in the middle of shot listing and re-writes. Scheduling rehearsals and making camera maps (storyboards haven’t really done it for me... yet).

I am not nervous, though I feel like I should be. I think I’m too tired and too focused to be nervous. Or there’s just too much to do just to fill the frame with something interesting that I’m numb to the whole process. It’s like the moment my collaborators and I said, “We’re making this movie” it stopped being a movie and became an endless question and answer session. You just hope deep down inside that you’ve answered 100% of what’s been asked by the first day of shooting so you can just tell people when to hit record. 100% is probably too much to expect, this I know from working with other directors in the past 5-6 years.

I keep getting teased by my producer and my editor that I don’t sound like I’m having fun. It isn’t that I’m not having fun; it’s that I haven’t directed from a script that I wrote since Test Day and I’m re-learning a bunch about this process. But five (!) years in the editing room has taught me a ton about design, about space, about cutting (obviously) and about performance. All the stuff I’m having to re-learn is just all the things I’ve avoided since graduating RTF: equipment check-out, casting, shot listing, costumes, communicating... I don’t know... a unified vision.

But for the three or four people stumbling and reading this blog, I promise you: I’m having a blast.

[And in case you haven’t caught on, seeing as this is the first post ever to my first ever blog: I’m in pre-production for my first short film since 2004 [!]. There’s been a lot of talk over the years about doing this again; let’s hope I can back it up with something the most of us can dig].
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Does this make it official?