I had a fab idea for a new screenplay the other day, one that might even be within the realms of reason to make on a low budget. So I’ve had my trusty Dramatica out to see if the idea holds water. It seems to. There are some interesting themes that’ll be fun to explore, so I’ve decidied to put the sci-fi screenplay on the back burner (the first step in accepting it’ll never probably get finished!).

There is nothing greater than the feeling you get when something fresh and exciting spills out of your finger tips and onto the keyboard, especially when it keeps on making sense, and getting better when you start to flesh it out. I haven’t had that feeling for a while (well, this time last year when I was writing House of Donn, I guess). It’s a very refreshing experience.

The ‘Greetings’ edit/audio tidy up labours onwards. I’m now up to page 22 of 80 (as the script goes), so I think I’m roughly on target to get the first pass complete by the end of February (if I carry on at my present speed). I’m getting a dab hand at matching up the good audio with the old.

Speaking of audio, my trusty collaborator Darren has agreed to help out with the music, I suppose we’ll work it like we did with House of Donn, where he writes the source material, gives me the MIDI files and I mess it up and arrange it into the film.

Lots to do…

I’ve been hearing a lot about this film over the past few months, mainly because my esteemed friends Ben, John and Keith are all taking either lead roles and/or a significant role in production.

They’ve just put up a web site, which I must say looks rather slick.

They had been filming mainly at weekends up to the end of last year, but it sounds like the key personnel have taken January off from whatever pays the bills to get the majority of principle phoptography done. I haven’t heard from Ben or John for a couple of weeks so I guess they’re down Brighton way filming now. It’ll be interesting to see the end result.

My most excellent buddy Dave bought me Lost in La Mancha for Christmas so I sat down to watch it yesterday. Man, that is a frightening film. I do hope Terry Gilliam gets it together and finishes it.

I can’t help but think how good Ken would be as Don Quixote, he has the right mix of humour and mournfulness that I think Gilliam is looking for.

I don’t know if Ken can ride a horse though…

Ten days into the new year and I haven’t posted yet, I do apologise.

I’ve been deep into editing Greetings and now I’m starting to make reasonable progress. I’ve just about finished the first ‘scene’ which is actually by far the longest – nearly nine pages of script. I say ‘scene’ it’s actually an extended montage of scenes setting the up the location and character relationships.

I’ve tried to do as good a job as possible on it (short of grading it), replacing virtually every piece of dialogue with the audio recorded on the DAT player. I still don’t quite understand why it’s so bad on the camera – I thought there would be the occasional buzz on the track from where the camera was positioned too close to a light, but nearly every track seems to have additional reverb or distortion that isn’t there on the DAT. Most odd.

I’ve also managed to find an extra sixty seconds of footage compared to the previous cut which makes for a much less frenetic viewing experience which should please Ken.

It’s interesting trying to get into the story, especially into the mind of Ken, to understand what he wrote and how he directed the actors. I struggled with a few shots until I realised that actions that seemed to show people, especially the female lead, acting out of character were in fact perfectly setting up the conflict for later on. I guess it’s all part of the process of getting the story under my skin.

I’m really liking Final Cut Pro as well, and now I’m finding all the neat shortcuts, my productivity is increasing exponentially (though I still think the edit will take until the end of February at the earliest).

I don’t think FCP is better than Avid yet, but I don’t think it’s any worse. They are quite different beasts. I think I’ll appreciate FCP more once I get further through the workflow and I need to shoot off over to Soundtrack Pro and Shake.

I’ll cobble my thoughts together and do a comparison of the two in a future post…