So things did not work out well with my shooting first round of shooting. I managed to scrounge up enough actors to make the thing work, but people who had promised to help me on the technical side of things suddenly stopped returning my emails. This put me in the unfortunate roll of having to shoot and star in my travesty of a project.
After about 10 hours of shooting I finally accepted that it wasn't going to work. There was just too much to do, and I needed people who knew how to operate cameras and mics to work with me in order to make it all work. Within a 10 minute period I went through all the 5 stages of grief like clockwork. If the camera was rolling, I would have turned that in as my capstone. It was my magnum opus.
If I had to describe the whole ordeal with a scene from a movie it would be from Boogie Nights when Dirk Diggler is paid by a redneck to pleasure himself in a parking lot. Unfortunately you can't find that clip ANYWHERE on the internet, so the final scene from There Will Be Blood is my backup.
I've met with Dr. Jason McKahan and talked to him about my options. I came to the conclusion that I've put enough work into the writing and planning of this whole ordeal that I can come out on top. Or at least somewhere in the middle. I'm planning on elaborating on some of my pre-writing, fixing some of the kinks in my screenplay, and finishing up my pre-visualizations. This will hopefully be enough to satisfy a base requirement.
On the back burner I have a little bit of hope still brewing. For the past few months, I've spent at least 20 hours a week working on this project. I was really looking forward to shooting this thing and
hopefully making something good. I'm not willing to Old Yeller my project.
I'd talked to Dr. Jason McKahan PHD about shooting a trailer for my film since there is a precedent of film makers shooting trailers in order to pitch their story. That's certainly a viable option, but I'd like to aim a little bigger.
Two of Paul Thomas Anderson's films were originally short films before becoming feature length films. (Hard Eight and the aforementioned Boogie Nights) This has been done by other filmmakers such as the creators of Beasts of the Southern Wild who used their short Glory at Sea! in order to raise funds to shoot a feature. All of these shorts are more spiritual predecessors than shorts that were adapted to a longer format, meaning they laid out a basic aesthetic and established themes the filmmaker wished to tackle, but compared to their feature length counterparts, they are similarly dissimilar. The themes and aesthetic established in the shorts are in many cases the only things linking the two.
I'd argue that a precedent has been set by films such as these. The shorts were created using the resources at their disposal, and though they didn't not reflect the ultimate vision of the filmmaker, they set the tone of what they hoped to achieve. I'd really like to attempt to do something like this. I now know everything I have at my disposal, whereas previously I was optimistically unaware. I'd like to, in the coming week, create an incredibly stripped down version of my screenplay. Something no more than 10 minutes in length, that would capture some of the main themes and aesthetic I had hoped to accomplish in shooting my original script. I should have enough time to shoot it and rustle together a cut or two. This would function as kind of pitch.
What this all boils down to is I'm pissed off that my project fell apart and I really want to shoot something. I've been working towards this for four years and to have it vanish like Marty McFly right in front of me has been heart breaking. Also, I've always wanted to light a cigar and say, "I loveit when a plan comes together." I've never had a plan come together and I was banking on this being the one. That's been the hardest thing to work through.
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