The Soft Places

It really seems I'm neither here nor there right now with my projects. Maybe I just need a really good block of time to try and get some bits done and dusted as much as possible.

The good news front is that I went to see one of the actresses for the recast role in Stranded on Friday night - she was very good and really nice too. I'm hopefully seeing the other woman who's up for the role this week, which means I should be able to have made a decision by the end of the week and try to finalise a shooting day in August. I really cannot wait to have this film all shot.

Other projects seem up in the air - a few weeks ago I threw myself into doing some grading and effects work on my feature film, Gettin' Some. The main thing I was doing was fudging a depth of field look to some of the footage to try and make it look a touch more cinematic as opposed to nasty video. I've had some degree of success and it doesn't look too bad. With my sound designer friend up for doing the sound mix, it seemed there was a good reason to focus on getting this done especially as I'm going to focus on releasing the film in monthly episodes.

However, this depth of field effect was quickly becoming a massive amount of work for not particularly accurate results. Ryan, who is doing the digital squibs etc on Goodnight, Halloween suggested I should use the program Combustion to do the depth of field effects. So I ordered a book from Amazon, which looks potentially pretty daunting, with a view to doing the effects with this software. But now I need to find the time to go through the book and learn the package...maybe doing that instead of writing this blog would be a help,,,

But the other project which has reared its head is The Reprise. This is the next feature length project that I want to make and I'm hoping to try and raise some cash to help make it. My friend and fellow film maker Gus is keen to help make it and raise the money, but of course everything is waiting on me finishing the script...which I hadn't worked on since February, despite me originally telling him that a first draft would be done by the end of March.

So I've gone back to that in the last week and it's been a real struggle. Usually my scripts flow pretty effortlessly, but this one seems to be a real struggle. Maybe that's a good sign. Maybe it's also a very bad sign. I'm really not too happy with what I'm writing, but persevering as I know it's the first draft and just have to get past the psychological block of this first draft to really start honing it. I know some changes I want to make for the second draft, it's just getting to that stage.

I'm currently at around 50 pages, so potentially only another 40 to go. Not sure its a good idea that I'm counting down the pages. That can't be a good sign, can it?

So I'm stuck in these soft places, with nothing much concrete happening on anything, a bit of this and a bit of that. Not great, really...