During my last post, I hated filmmaking. I am happy to report that things are looking up! I would like to take this post to update you all on our progress, primarily with the results of our Seed&Spark campaign as well as all of the meetings and decisions made over the last few weeks (I had a very busy Thanksgiving break). While this whole process is still extremely stressful, time-consuming and bothersome, these steps forward are reassuring. I can feel my second wind coming and I am very excited.
To begin, you’ll remember that we began our fundraising campaign through Seed&Spark and after a few days of filming a promo video and many more days of filling out all of the necessary text boxes on the site itself, we launched it to the public. Well, I am happy to announce that after a month of that site being up, we obliterated our goal of $3500! I am very grateful for support from my circle and even some complete strangers and am excited to put their contributions to good use. The extra money that we were able to raise also allowed us to tweak our budget sheet, giving us much more leeway for elements like craft services (food), production design and post-production elements. Again, I am very thankful to everyone who contributed and promise we will use your generosity well!
Our fundraising announcement photo posted on our Instagram! @cocainetolondon
With this big step completed, we were able to get the ball rolling on many other aspects of pre-production. For one, with this tweaked budget sheet being more or less set in stone, I was able to start messaging and meeting with the many departments and get their aspects of the pre-production phase started. Most notably, I am talking about the PD and costuming departments, who I was able to have meetings with, giving them their total budget so they can start shopping for the many necessary props and outfits which bring my script’s world to life.
On top of meeting with these departments, I also began meeting with my lighting department and my assistant director. This is because, at around the same time that the Seed&Spark came to a close, me and my camera team were able to finish our first draft of the shot list for the film! This is perhaps an even bigger moment than the Seed&Spark completing because while money is cool and all, it cannot compare to the creative milestones. After five weeks and about 12 hours of reading through the script and visualizing shots, we had created an outline for the film. The whole short film had been made, compiled together in a mess of Zoom sketches and incomprehensible hand-written notes… but it was there… in 69 meticulously planned shots.
This moment allowed us to begin creating everything we needed for shooting from the official Google Sheets based shot list to our shooting schedule (which is currently in the process of being built). It also made the entire shoot that much more imaginable. There are a lot of small things that go ignored in the grandiose discussion of set life, from where the cast and crew will relax between shots, to where to set up the video village (a location where the crew can watch the shot as it is being filmed) to how best we can have the crew multi task to finish the day quicker. With this shot list done, I was able to more easily visualize all of these gears in the giant mechanism that is making a film, fleshing the whole process out in my mind and making me much more confident in the feasibility and enjoyability that is possible on this set.
A sneak peek of our beautiful shot list!
Finally, we had another major breakthrough in the last week, this time in the casting department. You’ll remember, I was quite stressed out last post regarding our casting as we were having a very hard time casting our lead. I’m happy to report that with a lot of perseverance and a lot of cold DM’s on Instagram, we were able to secure many applicants and officially cast our protagonist! I am so happy with the person we picked, both for Viv (the lead) and for the recording engineer who we were able to recast successfully. Officially finding these two people leaves us with only one more character left to cast and a big weight off of our shoulders. Just like with the budget and the shot list, all of these breakthroughs help make the entire shoot so much more imaginable. I can see it, just over the horizon.
This does not mean we are in the clear. There are still a lot more things we have to do, but the ball is rolling on all of them and we are still within the schedule that we had created for ourselves so long ago at our first producer meeting. All I can do is keep it moving and look forward to the future, a topic I would like to explore in my next, and perhaps, final post, but we’ll deal with that when we get there.
Until next time…
Devin