Show Busy-ness

Very close to shooting now, there has been a hive of activity going on at our workshop getting everything ready for shoot. Casting has now been finalized so we've been getting in touch with everyone who was successful in getting a role and we've been getting them in for costume fittings. Sets are being constructed, weapons and props are being built and costumes are being made.

I've been very busy on the producing side. here's an abridged version of what I've been up to:

- Materials sourcing (went to loads of builders, engineers, recycle centers, second hand shops, farming suppliers etc), finding wood, pallets, sheet metal, steel drums, clothes and other misc things.

- Finding out crew/cast availability

- Adding people to the mailing list/Trello

- Finding additional crew members (for things like hair, makeup, catering, fight choreography

- Working out our PledgeMe budget (in coordination with Lee)

- Looking into booking locations

- Buying thank you tokens for the people who have helped us out

- Tweaking the script

- Organising blocking sessions with actors and the fight choreographers

- Organising the BTS crew

- Sorting out transport for the crew and gear

- Assigning crew roles for on set

- Arranging to book out gear / looking for places we can hire/borrow gear from

- Writing up a credits and thank-you's document

- Misc other things...

Best I get some sleep, still plenty to do this week!

Finding Kristana

We've been stretched pretty thin over the last couple of weeks in particular with assignments and also the Rialto 48 Hour Film Competition that almost everyone in the team has been involved with. I was co-writing, co-directing and co-editing for our team entry 'The Rough Patch' - the goal for our team this year was really just to have fun and not take it too seriously - so I think we achieved that! We ended up writing something quite ambitious cast-wise and location-wise, and we had to re-write some things on the second day due to some of the material being too inappropriate for younger members of the cast that got brought in (it was a very 'Superbad' style of film. The film we ended up making was more of a fun romp kind of thing, but we were quite happy with the results considering we accidentally forgot to film a part of one of the scenes! We still managed to make it work in editing though. These things happen in 48 hours especially when no one has had much sleep!). I was originally meant to be directing it by myself but I think Richie and Doug ended up co-directing it because I was a little brain-fried from writing (and the many late nights leading up to R48!) - I'm not someone who likes to direct without having a precise plan as well - improv directing isn't really my cup of tea.

For games trailer, I've been part of the team that was running auditions. To be honest, I think there were problems with the way these auditions were organised (there needed to be more time given to advertising them - it was all a bit last minute. That said, we really are pushed for time now and a few more corners are having to be cut - much more than we would like). Something that has popped up as an issue as well was the fact that our script doesn't have a huge amount of dialogue, so we haven't got a lot of material to audition people with - we've mainly been working with one scene, trying to see if the people auditioning have understood the rest of the script and generally seeing how they have interpreted the characters. An important aspect of our lead character, Kristana, is that she needs to be able to convincingly convey a complex and often contradictory set of emotions/motivations that are consistent with her backstory. Also, she needs to have the physicality and athleticism to be able to perform the fight sequences. That has affected the way we have gone about casting the role. I had the idea of going to martial arts studios and gyms in order to advertise the casting call so we would be getting to see people of the right age and physical appearance. 

We will be running some more auditions next week in order to pin down the roles.

Also over the last week, we attended a workshop by one of the SIT arts tutors, Karl Hart. He ran us through the process of working with bone as a material and gave us some valuable advise on how to go about sourcing certain materials we will need for costumes, props and set building. Much of this week we will be focusing on sourcing, while the art department make a start on the materials we currently have.

Forging ahead

It has been a chaotic week so i'm a little late off the mark for this post. Anyway, we've finally got a script greenlit so we can begin preparing to shoot. There is a collosal amount of work to be done before shooting so I'm taking off my writers hat and putting on my producers hat now (or putting my writers hat aside for now at least - I'll have to tweak some dialogue later).

A few things have helped getting the script finished have been going back to classical genre structures. I found that even though the game/film is set in the future, in a post apocalyptic world, the structure was more like a western. Using, or adapting, the conventions used in a traditional western made it easier for me to gain some clarity on the motivations for certain characters. To be honest, I didn't really have much knowledge on the western genre before I started this project - I've seen a few, but it's not a genre I would normally seek out - although I might now because I've enjoyed finding out more about them. That said, some of my favourite films recently have been westerns: the superb '3:10 to Yuma' with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe and the brilliant 'True Grit' from the Cohen brothers. I really enjoyed the behind the scenes footage from 'True Grit' as well, especially for the insights into costume and art direction.

'True Grit' BTS Featurette

I found a few links that gave me a good summary on the Western genre:

Western Genre (Wikipedia)

Western Genre Lecture

Genre: The Western

Our main character in our game trailer is female, which is not especially common for westerns, but she fit a lot of the conventions of a western protagonist (or one variation of it at least: The western hero walks alone; the hero is reluctant; the hero can be morally ambiguous - usually has a personal moral code he/she adheres to).

In many ways, the post-apocalyptic world elements fit nicely into the genre conventions of a western: Civilization vs the Wild.

Anyway, don't want to give too much away at this point. We will be focusing on art direction and casting next, as well as preparing for the actual shoot which is only two and a half weeks away.