C.R.T. Pre-Pro: The Past 72 Hours…
It’s been a rollercoaster, let me tell you that!
The stress of wondering whether you’ll find the right crew once you’ve put out the crew call? Bummer!
You end up finding candidates that seem enthusiastic, passionate, and capable? Awesome!
You have to go through six hundred applications for one role because you’re also the casting director? Bummer!
You start finding the right actresses and can’t wait to audition them? Awesome!
You’re spending hours slicing away as much of the budget as you can when you should have invited actresses to audition already? Bummer! (This part sucks.)
Future filmmakers should have spotted something in the last sentence. Why the hell am I going over my budget at this stage in pre-production, while hiring crew and asking for auditions? EXACTLY.
Forgive any attitude on my part. Please understand, it’s been a stressful couple of days.
There’s clearly a process to filmmaking, but especially pre-production, which I’m finding out. You get the screenplay absolutely ready (how you know whether it’s ready or not will be a topic for a future post). You hire a producer and make a budget. You do your own storyboards. You then may possibly want to put them away for a couple of days, and see if you can come up with better shots. You then hire someone to do the storyboards, unless you can draw really, really well. Once you have these things in play, you put out an audition notice and a crew call.
You don’t do all these things at the same time, like I am doing. Due to some feedback I got on this screenplay last minute, I have been making a choice to rewrite half of the screenplay and completely redo my storyboards, since the old storyboards no longer apply to the scenes in the new screenplay.
Whether or not I decided to rewrite the screenplay, I still would have made the choice to redo my storyboards. This I don’t regret. I feel like overall, the framing choices I’m making now are better and get the audience more invested. In my previous storyboards, I had barely any shots where the three leads were in the same frame, when this was important to visually communicating their dynamic as a family. I also drew shots that were really far away from the main characters, in over-the-shoulders or in wide framing, when a medium close-up would have made more sense, considering the importance of what was being said in the scene and the emotion behind it.
If you can as a filmmaker, do your storyboards, put them away for a couple of days, and do them again. I’m not saying it will always be feasible to do this, but damn if this isn’t a helpful exercise.