Having the experience from last year's project has been very useful. It fair to say that everyone involved learned a lot. We found a lot of areas that needed improvement.
Despite my best efforts, I've found myself in the script development team - as well as the producing team. Mixing the two roles is something I've previously said should probably be avoided...
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| "So now you've noticed how much time he spends doing things he says never to do". |
However, having learned what didn't work last year, it puts me in a better place to guide the script team this year. I think the key to this year will be keeping the team motivated and consistently moving forwards. Time is our number one enemy, and it's a resource we will need to use effectively.
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| The team discuss one of the concepts that was pitched. |
From my point of view, I don't care how we come up with the script (hopefully a good one!) or who "the writer" is, the number one priority is getting the thing made - on time and on budget. One thing I've noticed about writing teams are that the meetings often descend into endless discussions on options; "we could do X, or another option is to Y. Alternatively, if we switched out A and B and added C..." . There comes a point when you have to say "yes, we could do all those things, but what are we going to do".
Last year we got stuck in development hell, going in circles for weeks, and it's arguable whether we came out with a script which was any better than the original. Ultimately, that took it's toll on the team's patience, slowed down the momentum, and pushed us for time.
We had a script meeting over the weekend, and we agreed that the concept we had needed to be shortened to fit within two minutes, but there were various opinions on how best to cut it. I really want to avoid us getting too bogged down in an endless development stage, so I decided it was best to start writing up each of the scenarios into scripts to see how they all play out.
I also decided a good idea would be to have the scripts tested for practicality - on Monday we will read though the scripts with the HODs so they can do a feasibility analysis. Basically, this will be a breakdown of the script, trying to assess how difficult or time consuming each script would be to produce. Once this is done, the full team can vote on the script they think will be best for us to pursue. In that way, the whole team has ownership on the decision of how best to proceed, and it should give us a rough indication of how much work is ahead.
I really want to improve our team communication and organisation this year. I've been writing the agendas and transcribing the minutes for each of our meetings, and making sure they get to everyone in the crew via email and our group page.
I've put a bit of effort into making them look profession instead of just the bog standard lists - makes them a bit more pleasant and easy to read.
I've also been doing a bit more research into casting calls. Although last years casting call turned out okay, I think there were some areas to improve on. Casting calls don't sound too difficult to run, but I think there are some traps. For example, I think we probably could have used some better scripts - some of the scripts we used required us to explain a lot of the film's story so the person auditioning could understand the context for the scene. For the person auditioning, trying to absorb that much information can't be particularly comfortable, especially when they are already likely to be nervous. Doing casting calls, I think one of the most important things to be aware of is trying to make the experience as pleasant for the people auditioning as possible. Also, choosing scripts that require a lot of explanation isn't a very time-efficient way of running an audition, so it's probably best to chose scenes which can be summed up concisely.
I found this video which was pretty handy and gave me a few tips on running casting calls.
I also had a look at some professional auditions to see how they were being run. This is Evangeline Lilly's audition tape for 'Lost'.
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