Things are really starting to happen now. Lisa, my new found production assistant, has managed to hire a set of Dedolights for the shoot from our old college for an outrageously low price, which is amazing.

On top of that the other two key props, a Backgammon Set and a Cremation Urn, were also acquired today. The backgammon came courtesy of Amazon, the Urn courtesy of my esteemed friends Daz and Nick. Cheers guys!

I caught up with our sound guy, David Motta, this evening. He’s happy that for the first time in ages he’ll be able to walk to work. He sounds like a top chap with a decent taste in music. He’s going to bring what we need for the sound, so that’s all of the technical stuff covered as well.

Now it’s a case of sorting the set dressings out and working out how to feed everyone.

Tomorrow’s task – make some fake blood.

With the shoot fast approaching, I realised that funds might not be as tip top as I hoped they would be. The whole project has turned around in next to no time, which I’m sure is something I’ll never experience again (based on the horror stories I’ve heard about development hell).

Consequently, with the coffers sinking lower, it’s time to don my best winning smile and say that if anyone does want to help out financially with the film, I would be most appreciative.

I’ve added a Paypal Donate link to the site (for the majority of you who seem to read this blog through RSS readers, it’s here.) Credits for all donations and a copy of the film for donations over £10 ($20 US) (make sure you tell me your address!).

I’ll upload the shooting script in the next day or two, once I’ve had a chance to update and check through the latest, and hopefully last, set of changes that we made yesterday.

Everything is starting to fall into place for the shoot now. I have an excellent crew, which is growing steadily. Chris Knowles (whose year long tenure of Kent Screen comes to an end on Friday) has offered to come and help out as 1st AD as well which is cool.

It’s going to be very strange moving from a crew which more or less knew nothing about making a film with SToA to working with a cast and crew that are all vastly more experienced than me and have worked on such films as Aliens, Saving Private Ryan and Empire Strikes Back.

One half of my brain is telling me to “run like hell, boy, you’re way out of your depth!” The other, calm rational half, is telling me that with all this skill at my disposal, I can’t really go wrong, can I?

Thankfully, the calm side is winning hands down. Right, now where’s that Paul McKenna CD…

We’re locked down to shoot the new short on the 3rd – 5th April. I have two pro actors, a top notch DP and Sound Guy, a much better camera than we used before, a location and… no lights. Or a tripod. Minor technicalities which I’m sure I’ll iron out this week. Still, if anyone has a set of Dedolights they aren’t using the week after next and are reasonably close to Kent (UK) I might need your help!

I’ve been rewriting the script quite a bit, it’s amazing how much dialogue you can trim when you know you’ve got actors who will be able to play the parts without having to vocalise every nuance. Although it’s shaved two pages of the original ten pages, it makes for a much more dramatic affair.

I’ve developed Ken’s ideas even further now to the point where I’ve been able to give it the working title ‘Assassins’. Everything is dovetailing nicely together now (even as I’m writing this I’m realising more connections and ideas for Ken and Ben to play with).

I’ve also made quite a bit of progress on a second rewrite of my Architurus script in the past week as well. I’m finally getting a good feel for what the story is really about (and just keeping it to that), which has meant quite a lot of changes, but much for the better. I think progress will be slow on that front for the next few weeks, but it’s something to keep me busy at idle moments.

The lunch date with Ken, Ben and Den(is) went well. Ken had some excellent suggestions for improvements to the script which I’ve rewritten ths evening. It wasn’t hard as his main suggestion changed almost the entire script, yet all I’ve had to do is delete about ten lines of dialogue and change one. Incredible.

I really liked the way Ken completely got the script, the idea that the tension between the two characters (a father and son) should be in the silences betwixt the dialogue (and hence the reason I hung out for Ben to try to pursuade Ken to do it as I felt he would be able to pull off the emotional intensity I want from the father character).

We discussed length of shoot. Denis and I had assumed two days, but Ken pointed out that if we wanted to get lots of subtle eye work, plus choreograph a game of Backgammon, it would probably take three.

Ben and Denis seem to be good for a shoot sometime around the 4th-6th April, which isn’t long away (zoiks! two weeks in fact). Ben will be confirming Ken’s availability tomorrow.

One bonus from the new improved version of the story is that we can use my house as the main location now. I was thinking that it looked too modern with too many contemporary trappings to be an old persons’ home, but after we discussed Ken’s ideas for his character, I realised that he would more likely be living in a house like ours than the drab one I had originaly envisioned.

So I need to get my skates on now and finish (well start) the script analysis and storyboards. I also have a list of tasks a mile long to sort out in the next few days.

I felt a real wretch today. This morning our company announced it was laying off everyone in the manufacturing facility across the road from where I work. 500+ jobs to go in the next two years. That’s a major blow for the local area in which our company is one of the biggest employers. Needless to say there was much doom and gloom in the air.

And then, as I stood in the queue at the bank, Ben rang me up with the exciting news that Ken Colley has agreed, subject to availability, to be in the new short! My god, I nearly floated out onto the High Street.

We’re all going to meet up tomorrow lunchtime, (Ken, Ben, Denis the DP and myself) to try to schedule the shoot.

Got an e-mail this evening to say the Brooklyn Film Festival had received their copy of SToA, so I’m confident the Cannes crew got theirs on time (it had to be there yesterday at the latest and only had to get as far as Paris, which is actualy closer to me here than Leeds).

With a huge sigh of relief, I posted the film off to the Cannes and Brooklyn Film Festivals at lunchtime today.

I also got to preview the film projected properly in our training centre at work today. It was a strange feeling sitting there alone in a darkened room watching the images flash by on the big screen. A mixture of pride, bewilderment and awe. I tried to make myself step back and not watch it critically. I succeeded for a minute or two and was really pleased that it looked like a top quality, professional film (well, as top quality as miniDV will allow).

Tomorrow lunchtime I’m going to have a small private screening for my friends at work. I was very excited about the prospect earlier, but now I’m starting to get nervous…

That’s it! Secret Thoughts of Angels is now officially complete. OK, I might make a few more changes to it in the next week or two, but these will be superficial – a bit more cleaning of audio and perhaps a tweak of an edit. Apart from that I’m totally over the moon with it.

I used the new h.264 codec from Apple to output the film. Man, it looks good. It took nearly four hours to render, but it was worth it. I was beginning to sweat a bit as Ulead DVD Workshop 2 kept crashing when I tried to get it to burn down to DVD, but my trusty old Apple Mac came to the rescue with iDVD.

The web site is just about there – if you haven’t checked it out it’s at http://www.secretthoughtsofangels.co.uk. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but I hope to have it complete by the end of the week. The press areas are a bit thin on the ground, and I want to put some funky downloads up there as well.

For now, I shall burn three copies of the film and hit the sack. Too many late nights on the trot are starting to take their toll!

The time stretching continues as Daz and I race towards finishing the sound mix for SToA. Last night (Sunday) we finished the music which I think is excellent. Tonight we’ll be mixing it all together, tomorrow I’ll be burning the DVD and Wednesday I’ll be posting it off to Cannes.

I think the music will need a bit more work once we’ve had a week or two to reflect, but it’s more than good enough to send out (I marked on the Cannes submission that it was a work in progress which buys us more time to make imrpovements to the sound track if we want to).

On the New Short front, Ben’s informed me that his DP friend is interested in helping out, which is good as Nic, who DP’d SToA, is off to France for a few months to work.

I’ve also been reading up on David Siegels’ ideas about the nine act structure. I’m not entirely convinced by it – it seems to me he’s still describing a three act structure, just with a bit more detail about how to structure those acts. Also it slightly assumes, in Dramatica speak, a good ending, which you might not want to write.

Nonetheless, there’s some good stuff in there, and it’s certainly helped me see some holes with the Architurus script, which can’t be a bad thing.

From one extreme to the other! While the week before last was non stop, now things seems to be on go-slow.

No progress on the short film front, though I’m hoping that as I write Daz is completing a splurge of creativity that should see the main part of the music on SToA done.

Everything is ready to go for the Cannes submission, so hopefully we should be home and dry by the end of the week.

I’ve been thinking that I should reconsider my strategy on Cannes (currently – I’m only going if SToA gets selected). I realised this week that I might be missing out on quite a few opportunities. Screen South are offering 250 quid as bursaries for Cannes, so it might well be worth applying for that.

If anyone has any experience of Cannes and could tell me why a guy with a short and a feature length sci-fi screenplay (plus detailed pitches for several other films) should/shouldn’t go to Cannes and what use I could realistically get out of it, I’d greatly appreciate your feedback.

For the historically minded among you, this popped up on Project Gutenberg the other day.