Week 2 Summary

Week 2 has been very productive in two ways. One, we got our script finished and we love it! I seriously think this will be one of the more impressive cycle films of the year if I get my vision translated onto the screen the way I see it in my head.

Luckily, I got an excellent Cinematographer, Liz Heinlen, the girl behind all those famous Revlon commercials you've seen on TV. So I'm really pumped about our collaboration. The movie is a romantic comedy with lots of flowers. Flowers are one of the 3 main characters of the film. It's going to be great. So now I need to get good actors, and my producer needs to find and lock a nice location. We shoot from October 22 to 26. In the meantime we prepare and shoot a bootcamp scene as a warm up.

We also started delving into something that really opened my eyes to films in a new way. Point of View. It's one thing to talk about point of view in general, but here we got into technical decisions that shape how point of view is delivered. Every movie is told through some point of view (POV), be it the main character, multiple characters, or an external observer's perspective. We got into camera placement and motion, actor blocking, and cutting on looks (based on the eyes of the performers - who's looking at who and when). Now when I watch a film, I'm more aware of POV choices and how we get there. I found this to be very fascinating, and am going to incorporate some of these things into "Obsession", my cycle one film.

Other things we spent a lot of time on this week were safety rules and regulation, Screen Actor's Guild unions rules, and a load of paperwork. I'm glad I'm not a producer. It's unbelievable how much paperwork filmmaking involves.
It's going to be great for the directors because we get to focus on performance, camera, and making the film without worrying about the non-creative elements.