Well I had my first ‘production meeting’ with Nicky yesterday. She is very keen to help out with making SToA, and is generally positive about the new draft of the script. She has gone away to attack it with her red pen and come up with some comments.

We’ve agreed the first stage is to get the script really tight. I’m not sure how much needs doing to it, I think it’ll amount to fixing some dodgy dialogue, but that’s no hardship. People seem very happy with the structure, which I’m pleased with, and Nicky was impressed at generally how tight the plotting is.

Vicky, who I’ve speculatively lined up to play the main character Jess, has read it and liked it too, and came up with similar comments to Nicky.

Interestingly, when I wrote the opening scene, which occurs in a library, I had Canterbury University Library in mind (I spent a lot of time there while I was doing my degree). When we were sat there yesterday, Nicky looked up and said, ‘you know, when I first started reading this, I thought it was going to be like Harry Potter, with the library and all, but then when I got into it and thought about the opening scene, I pictured Canterbury Uni Library.’ Mysterious!

I’ll catch up with Nicky early next week, see how she’s got on with her red pen, hopefully she’s been kind…

I’m not sure how it will work with production roles, as we haven’t discussed how we’re going to do it, but I hope that I’ll direct and she will be either first AD or, more preferably, DOP. I’m not sure what her skill set strengths are at the moment, but I’m keen to let her deal with the technical aspects of shoot, as I’m nervous enough about directing, let alone sorting out a crew as well as a cast.

Darren and Amber are keen to help out, which is the music and production design in the bag. Post-production is also more or less sorted, certainly for editing and sound mixing. We just need to sort out the locations, actors, crew and equipment. Not much then…

I think a trip to Kent Hothouse is in order in the near future, once the script is polished, and perhaps we’ve storyboarded it.