Things are so busy at work, I haven't had much of a chance to blog. I want to get back to talking about things besides the film, but for now, here's another update.
Tom and I are still tweaking the script. We had a great session on Saturday where we closed up a plot hole that was bothering me.
SAG returned my call yesterday and there seems to be no problem getting an Experimental Film Agreement in place. This excites me a lot. All of a sudden this feels like a real film.
I got a quote for equipment rental. Fortunately weekend rental counts as one day so that's keeping the costs down. I'm going to shoot on the Panasonic DVX100A, which can do 24p. I briefly toyed with going HD but not only is that 8x the price, it adds a bunch of additional requirements and complications to post-production. If it had been released in time, I probably would have shot on a Canon XL-2 given that I have an XL-1 at home that I'm used to.
In researching cameras, I came across a great self-published book called "Shooting Digital" from Marcus van Bavel of DVFilm, a company that does DV-to-Film transfers. The book is specifically for people shooting with digital cameras that intend (or in my case, hope one day to need) to transfer to 35mm film.
This weekend I also got around to trying out the Sun Frog film scheduling software I've mentioned before. I have to say, it's a very nice tool. I'll write a more detailed review shortly but it certainly makes management of breakdown items and schedules as well as the generation of reports very easy. And it has a nice modern interface which alone makes it feel so much more professional.
by : Created on July 28, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
On Wednesday, a casting call notice I'd submitted earlier to the NE Film site was posted. Almost immediately I started getting responses.
As of right now, I've received on the order of twenty responses. From a headshot perspective, we've got great fits for each of the three principal roles. However, my favourite for the lead is a SAG member. I've seen a demo reel and he is really good. I emailed him and told him the issue. The result: he encouraged me to call the Boston SAG office to try to get a SAG experimental contract expedited.
So if all goes well, I might be a SAG signatory for this film!
by : Created on July 22, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Tom did a full draft of the screenplay on Friday which we discussed in length over the phone on Saturday and Sunday. There were a lot of great things he added but I felt some key features of the original treatment were lost. Plus, both of us felt it was going to be more difficult to cast.
So this evening, Tom did another draft and sent it to me. It has some minor issues which we talked about on the phone again, but I think we pretty much have our script. And we thought of a great reference to Ferris Bueller's Day Off that fans of that film will immediately recognize.
The big challenge is now going to be casting. There are three principal parts: two males and one female. All three are professionals in their late twenties to early thirties. All interested non-union actors in the Boston-area are encouraged to send headshots and resumes to me (see contact information). Availability is required over two weekends mid-to-late August. I would have tried for a SAGIndie Experimental Film Agreement but we don't have time. Next film, I'll definitely apply.
by : Created on July 19, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Last weekend, when I should have been well into writing the script, I was still struggling on the treatment. I managed to get a rough sketch done but was worried I wasn't going to get an entire script written by 18th July which was my target.
Then on Tuesday, I was having lunch with some colleagues including our new director of professional services at mValent, Tom Bennett. Tom mentioned that he writes screenplays.
I told him about the project and yesterday sent him my treatment. That night he went home and wrote a brilliant first five pages—far better than I could have done.
So he's on board. I should have a first draft from him by the end of the week which means we can start scheduling, casting and location scouting.
by : Created on July 15, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
About eight years ago, I started noticing the number 37 appearing disproportionately in television and movies. It soon became a "cult" number for my girlfriend and myself—we'd ring up each other any time we saw a "37" somewhere (that was my excuse, anyway).
We soon came to distinguish three types of instances of 37:
The third, we referred to as "true 37s". It really is remarkable how many times 37 is the number people will come up with when they are randomly picking a number but want to sound specific (as in "I can think of 37 things wrong with this proposal").
I recently found:
which lists many instances of 37 (of which only some are "true 37s").
And my sister then found the following:
On that last link, make sure you follow the link on psychologically random numbers. It's where I picked up the term for this phenomenon that has fascinated me for almost a decade.
by : Created on July 9, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
It's not written up as a treatment yet, but James Marcus and I pretty much have the story worked out (mostly during trips in his car). The Ferris Bueller connection probably isn't going to work but maybe that can be saved for another film.
My goal is to write up the treatment this weekend and maybe sketch out some of the key dialog. I might try out some script editing software too, which reminds me: I've wanted to do a script editing plugin for Eclipse pretty much since 2.0.
by : Created on July 2, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
After I told a colleague about the Calkin-Wilf tree (see Enumerating the Rationals in Python), he suggested a program that would generate the tree graphically.
I decided it was a good excuse to try writing my first Eclipse 3.0 rich-client platform (RCP) application. Given the children of each node in the Calkin-Wilf tree are derivable solely from the node itself, it just took a little tree content provider and the RCP skeleton pretty much copied straight from the example app referenced in the online doc.
It worked out pretty well. Writing the application itself was straightforward; packaging it up with the necessary components from the RCP platform was not. It took a lot of trial and error to get the minimal set of additional plugins and to bootstrap the execution of the application outside of the IDE.
What I would like to see (and I'm sure will be in 3.1) are some improvements to the plugin development environment specifically for RCP; namely, a wizard for creating the base skeleton (plugin, app class and advisor class) and a wizard for packaging the RCP app for standalone execution.
by : Created on July 2, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
I've written a short script that enumerates the positive rationals without duplicates:
The script involves a simple generator wrapping a single-line iterative expression.
I've long been aware of the method of enumerating the positive rationals by walking the diagonals of the infinite matrix (with the numerator increasing across columns and denominator increasing down rows) but this results in duplicates (an infinite number for each rational number, in fact).
The approach taken in my script is based, instead, on walking a Calkin-Wilf tree. I became aware of this approach from a recent paper by Jeremy Gibbons, David Lester and Richard Bird which I found out about from the Lambda the Ultimate blog.
by : Created on July 1, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)