On April 22nd, 2023, at 10:15 AM, I was still half-unconscious in bed, scrolling mindlessly through something probably not at all funny, when I received an email from Studio North. At this point, it had been a month since I submitted the application for the Studio North Film Grant. I knew results would come soon, but even then, my heart sank seeing the notification pop up. Over a year of work already put into this script, this moment felt like the first act turning point that the entire process had been building towards. Still to this day, I don’t think I’ve read the whole email. All I saw was the first word: Congratulations!
I took a minute (maybe an hour… okay, maybe a few days) to be excited, before I immediately channeled these emotions into something else: productivity. A fire had been lit underneath me and the struggle I knew was looming on the horizon could only be countered by one thing: planning. So in late April, early May, as classes were winding down, I got to work.
Part of the initial submission process involved me collecting a crew for my film, or at least the beginnings of one. While some of my crew and their roles would shift from April to now, two people would remain consistent and it would be amiss if I didn’t shout them out here: my wonderful producers Cierra Gladden and Kaori Taylor.
See, one thing I forgot to mention is while I did get very motivated from this grant victory, it also means I got very annoying. Not in a mean, awful way but in the ‘this-is-my-child’, ‘I’m so nervous’, passion kind of way. The result was me bothering my two producers pretty much every day and I am super grateful that they have put up with me up to this point and put me in my place when I needed it.
All that being said, a lot of my annoying behavior was, at least at its core, necessary. We were now in the thick of things. We had just started a 1000 piece puzzle and the first step we needed to take was laying out all the pieces on our coffee table and trying to visualize the full picture. Our first producer meeting occurred on May 19th, after many texts were sent between the three of us, (mainly me chaotically listing things we would eventually need to do). During this meeting, we began the process of eventually.
The first photo taken at our first CTL meeting! Featuring Cierra Gladden (front) and Kaori Taylor (back).
Of the things we would need to plan for, there were six major topics. The first, LOCATION, was the simplest of the six. I knew that most of the film would take place in the JHU-MICA Film Centre’s Recording Studio, which was extremely helpful both for access and for moving time. There were two other locations that were outside, but luckily both Kaori and Cierra are from Baltimore, so they were both very confident in their abilities to find locations that matched my vision. It was at this point that a big aspect of being a director came into play: the idea of delegating tasks. With these six things needing to be finished and all three of us being students, I didn’t want to overwork anybody. I also wanted to pick people who seemed the most excited or interested in tackling that specific topic. Kaori had a few ideas for the exterior location of the recording studio and she seemed interested in finding more, so I assigned her to location duty.
The next topic was ACTORS. It was at this point that I was very grateful to have Cierra on the team as she has been through this process, already having won the Studio North FIlm Grant last year. She directed me to Backstage, the site that Studio North grant films have been using to cast actors all for free. We took a minute to make an account and I was assigned to begin filling out the necessary requirements of the site to make our casting public. This involved the details of the shoot itself such as location, timeframe and reimbursements, but also the details of the characters themselves with things like descriptions, age ranges and sides (pieces of the script that actors can read for their audition). I would be the one in charge of this actor process for the most part, but it would start being split between me and Cierra for reasons I will get to in a later post.
The next two categories, BUDGET and SEED&SPARK, go hand in hand and they are the topics we explored the least about in this initial meeting, just because of how expansive they are. Compiling the budget is perhaps the most important topic we had to figure out and for that reason, we mainly just introduced its existence and waited until we had more details on things like production design costs, actor reimbursement prices and whether or not I won any other grants. In a couple of months, Cierra, who I assigned to budget, would make three different budget plans based on the amount of money we eventually make, which was incredibly helpful for giving other departments rough estimates in the future. As for Seed&Spark, it is a money-raising site made specifically for film and it is the site we would use to raise more money. We would spend this session making Seed&Spark accounts and beginning the extensive process of creating our film’s page, such as planning a bit of our promo video, filling out the logline of the film and beginning to make incentives people receive for contributing.
We also touched a bit into the idea of MARKETING, but similar to budget, we mainly just created our Instagram account and said we would discuss this later.
Our current timeline for the month of October!
This leads us into the final topic of discussion: THE TIMELINE. It was this that took the longest, as we now had to take everything we had spent the last hour and a half discussing and turn it into a plan. We would spend another hour color coding all of these different topics in our Google Calendar, defining the day we needed actors by, when we wanted to start doing camera meetings, when we wanted to launch Seed&Spark, etc. The result was our entire film… fully planned out. An 8 month long process, not even counting post-production. After our meeting, I would stare at this Google Calendar for a long time. Here it was… COCAINE TO LONDON. It had begun.
Until next time…
Devin
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