Oooh, what a busy week.

Met up with Ben on Tuesday lunchtime to discuss moving forward with the new short. He likes it and is happy to play the part. He’s also hopefully passing a copy of the script on to Ken Colley to consider acting the other part, and to a few of his other friends who I’m hoping will DP and help out. No word yet since then, but it’s not like I’m sitting about twiddling my thumbs so I’m not too perturbed.

The rest of the week saw much more twiddling of sound fx on SToA, along with prep work on the DVD and more bits and pieces on the website. There’s not a lot more I can do on that now. Have to start thinking about a launch party for it as well.

Went up to London to see Ryan Adams on friday night at the Apollo. A magnificent evening, the guy is truly amazing.

On BAFTA night last year I made the following promise/challenge to myself –

…that within four years I’ll get an invite to the BAFTA’s

So one year on, what have I achieved to gain that coveted invite?

Not bad.

Three weeks and counting to the Cannes deadline. As I mentioned, the sound on SToA is now clean (I might need to do a couple of scenes again, mastering Audacity’s Noise Filter plugin took a little while and later results were definitely better than earlier).

Daz appears to be making slow but steady progress towards completing the music. He’s going through a big ‘thinking about it stage’, which I hope will culminate in a flurry of musical activity in the next week or two. His latest inspiration is Aeon Flux, which I haven’t seen, and based on his review (great music, but the films not much cop) I doubt I’ll be rushing out to see.

I need to get the SToA web site completed (just a few more tweaks and twiddles) and get the pack sorted out for submission.

I also heard back from Ben. He liked the script so I’ll be meeting up with him this week to discuss it further. With only 9 days left of the month and Ben (as far as I know) away most of March filming, I don’t think the short will be shot any time soon. But as the storyboarding is taking more time than planned I shan’t be losing any sleep over it.

Have been having fun working on the sound effects for SToA this week. Although it was a task Daz was originally going to take on, increased work pressures have meant for him 6 day weeks for a little while now, significantly cutting into his already limited time. So I’ve stepped into the breach and set about doing the tedious work of cleaning up dialogue and making everything sound as amazing as I can, freeing him up to do what he does best, play music.

Again it’s making me appreciate another aspect of the filmmaking process that I guess a lot of writers don’t get first hand experience of; the power of sound in action. Now we all know (at least we should) that sound is very important in a film, but until you start throwing stuff about it really isn’t easy to appreciate just how subtle and powerful it is, or how it can change your perception of a cut or an action. It’s quite amazing really.

Only a month and three days before the Cannes submission deadline. We’d better get our skates on.

I’ve also been storyboarding the new short, now proudly sporting the working title ‘Pills’. A few more people have taken a ganders and given me their opinions, mainly thumbs up, thankfully, although I’ve still yet to hear from Ben.

Not having access to the storyboard software I used for SToA, I’ve been dusting off my A-Level Art skills and doing them by hand. They’re rubbish, but I’m turning them out a lot quicker than I did with the software.

Also, I’m finding I’m thinking a lot more on a shot by shot basis, which I found I didn’t using the software (inexperience or laziness prompted me to paint with much broader brushstrokes). I’m sketching them out on index cards, which also makes it easy to play with the juxtaposition of shots allowing me to previsualise the story much better than I ever did with SToA.

The short screenplay is now well and truly rewritten. I showed it round to a few people this week, and while I’m still waiting on some feedback, most of it has been positive, generally of the opinion that it’s good, if not a little dark.

The ending, which I really like, has caused the most debate. I did wobble for a while and think perhaps I’d missed the mark and should consider revising it, but for now I’m sticking to my gut feeling and running with it as it stands (plus I really can’t think of anything better that isn’t either cliche or plain nonsense).

So now I’m turning my thoughts to shooting it. I’m still waiting to hear from Ben, that’ll be the first step to see if he’s on board. Then it’ll be a case of finding someone to play the Old Man and a suitable location. If the worst comes to the worst, it could be shot at home here, though I think our taste in decor might not sit too well with the premise that it’s meant to be an old couple’s house.

For those clicking through here from Fun Joel’s recent entry on shorts, my take is that a short can have the same structure as a feature. Both SToA and the new short both have three acts (even though the new one is only 9 pages long). Perhaps that’s the benefit of using Dramatica though, structure starts to become implicit in everything you do.

I was pleasantly surprised when I broke the new short back down into it’s sequences, it had a really nice structure, almost chiastic, and allowed me to see where I could improve it further with visual ideas and timings.

I had a similar experience with SToA. My only problem with SToA is that I tended to do a new scene for each variant of the four throughlines (effectively 16 sequences). I tried to get around it by hiding one of the throughlines, but I don’t feel I was 100% successful.

With the new short I’ve tried to shy away from this and work more at blending various sequences together (in fact I thought I’d gone too far, hence my pleasant surprise that the structure still seemed to be there). The fact that it all more or less takes place in one room makes it easier though.

I like what Mackendrick wrote in ‘On Filmmaking’ – that a short could be seen as a sequence from a feature. Each sequence should have its own logical internal structure, much like that of a feature, and that if you could prove that you can make a short with a decent structure, you shouldn’t have too much trouble making a feature.

I have no idea how true this is, but it seems to make sound sense to me.