The Beginning? Not really. Sort of the Middle…
I decided to attempt a production diary with the thought that it might help me remember not to procrastinate (too much) and to show myself and the cast/crew that all their hard work is working….
As time permits, I will do a flashback to catch us up to the current status of the production of “The Apartment.” As I do this, I will have to add entries on a day to day basis. My only attempt at organization will be to keep the entries in the order that the events that I write about occured. The drawback to this is that if you are reading this, there will always be new entries popping up in different areas of the stream… Check the Recent box for new entries.
The concept for this script started with a conversation with David Crosson (cinematographer). We were trying to come up with a couple of concepts that could be used as a base for whatever category and such that we got from the Pittsburgh 48 Hour Film Festival.
I was looking through my story concepts and partial scripts for something that could be used as the kernel for the contest. Since the whole idea of the 48 hour film festival was to write/shoot/direct something from scratch, all I needed was something that could be expanded once the contest started and used a minimum of actors and locations. I found a three line note about some people trapped in an apartment by a bomb. The story would unravel around the how and why.
It turned out that an event on my schedule wouldn’t allow me to participate, so I wrote up some 3×5 cards on the idea and filed it away. A few weeks later, on my vacation with my wife and kids (the conflicting event) I grabbed a couple of hours during some downtime and knocked out 4 pages of script. I put this back with all the other short scripts and pushed it to the back of my mind to ferment…
I was getting itchy to do something quick and dirty to get momentum going in order to do something “larger” so I looked through my notes and script pile and pulled out this project, named “The Apartment.” It was doable with 5 actors once I dropped all except the absolute minimum. It could be shot in a single location, like “The Man From Earth”, which I feel is one of the best examples of a single location, dialog driven story. I was pretty sure that the project and could be shot over a single weekend if I shot with my existing equipment: A Canon XL-1S, and a Canon XL-2. I know they aren’t HD, but I felt that with proper lighting, the video could hold up very nicely on DVD. Also, hopefully, I could get David Crosson to come down from D.C. to do the first camera work and I would act as Director and steadicam/second camera.
I decided to expand the script to about 16 pages. With the dialog heavy footage, it should come in at 20 minutes which would qualify for the short category in most film festivals.
Posted local ads in Craigslist (Pittsburgh) and also ads with Talent6, Masify, Explore Talent, Casting Nation and I also scanned Model Mayhem and HollywoodProfiles. Over the next couple of weeks, I got over 30 responses from actors and 4 from actresses… None of the actors appealed to me and only one of the actresses looked good for one of the female leads, but she was in NY and the travel expenses for her would be almost twice what I would be spending on the rest of the production…
Quickly realized that I wouldn’t be able to shoot in late November for the simple fact that I didn’t have a single role cast to my satisfaction… Rescheduled for Jan 23rd/24th, 2009.
Re-ran ads and re-posted the casting calls. I was beginning to realize that there were a few inherent problems with dealing with casting sites…. One of them (Talent6.com) filtered any messages that I sent to more than one actor/actress. If there was anything that they didn’t like, (such as me asking them to register on my production site so that I could keep track of everyone) they simply didn’t send the message out and would call me a couple of days later and say that they were only looking out for the safety of the talent (and their own interests…) I eventually stopped using them and I am considering setting up my own casting site…. (Another fine idea that I don’t have time to execute…)
Really disappointed with answers to last posting. I reran the cast call… Did find a wonderful make-up artist. I’ll post her resume and pix a little later in the week…..
Typed that date right the first time… Portends to great things….
I will be posting an updated script in the next couple of days. It has greatly “beefed-up” April and Joanna’s characters with two added scenes and almost double the dialog, with Peter getting in some “telling” character development.
The hunt for a Lisa continues…