Time For a Change
I’ll be changing the look of this website soon to something a little more streamlined.
Post on the project is now out of my hands, and in those of Sound and Color. To elaborate on the last post, I decided to take the music out completely. So a film that I had initially envisioned to be accompanied by some kind of score is now…not. I just hope the audience won’t be able to tell. There’s a montage sequence at the end that I’m wondering is going to somehow appear very “naked” to viewers. It’s just the family setting the dishes down on the table with a voiceover, and I don’t know if it’s enough. Nothing I can do about it now. I’m wondering how much sound and color will change things in the final cut.
Stumbled upon the work of Cloudy Rhodes today, which is so good that right I’m now wondering why I’m even bothering making anything.
Currently working on the same projects I’ve been for the past month. Everything is taking five years. I’m doing two outlines for separate projects. You think work will progress in a linear fashion, that you’ll have one act plotted out and finish act two by the end of the week. Instead, you stumble upon a question you can’t answer when creating a scenario in your head (who loads the equipment into the club? How much time does it take for a drummer to set up their gear?), and you spend twenty to thirty minutes researching before you get a satisfactory answer.
You need to decide the events that convey the proper information, or whether you need them at all. You need to decide upon the character information that supports the plot information (if the principal calls the mom at one in the afternoon and she picks up the phone, what kind of job would she have that would allow her to do this, and have an extended conversation?). You don’t think of these answers right away. You write, write, and write some more. These things take time.
The more that I do this, the more that I’m starting to equate writing with digging/excavation. You write stuff, erase it, go on tangents, go down rabbit holes, stumble upon details, expand upon those, come back to your original idea, and eventually find the thing you’re looking for, the actual detail that you may use in the film (but you might not, either). The process doesn’t always happen this way, but I’m finding that what they call development doesn’t happen all at once. It seems to happen when it happens, in correspondence with the skills of whoever’s doing the developing. And I think what’s clear is that I’m not a natural at creating these organic situations in which the movie can just progress from my brain to the tips of my fingers to a screenplay in a linear fashion without effort. This is taking work, and time (there’s that word again). And I just need a screenplay. I need a piece to have in my portfolio. But at the rate this is taking, it could be two years before I have a fully developed story, which would put me about on par with Pixar’s pace, haha. But those guys have the luxury of time. I don’t.
DP Spotlight: Mia Cioffi Henry (Superior, The Surrogate), Lauren Guiteras (Ma Belle, My Beauty)