Don't Take This Personally... But I've Decided You Don't Exist

She was beautiful, but our time together was only a season and she was gone.

Murray called me last week with an idea. A terrible idea. A painful idea. He wanted to get rid of a minor character. Not just any character, one of my favorite characters. So I wasn't letting her go without a fight.

Come on Murray. She has the funniest bit in the whole story.

No she doesn't. Because she's not even part of the story.

But she represents so many themes we want in the film.

We'll fit them in some other way.

We can't. She will seriously be a lot of people's favorite thing about the movie.

So now they'll have a different favorite bit.

And we're already short on female characters anyway.

We can't keep her just to meet some quota in your head.

I had lots of arguments, but there was one major problem I couldn't overcome.

She wasn't important.

She was only there because it was fun to have her in the movie. We added her when we were fleshing out the main character because she was part of his past and she represented the way things would be if he settled for an ordinary life.

But our tragic mistake was never weaving her into the plot. She was just these funny moments that interrupted the real story. I blame myself.

Maybe we could keep her in the story and find a way to make her more integral to the plot. But we're already looking for ways to reduce the page count.

So now she's gone. I know I'll miss her.

Damn the Damsel

 

You learn a lot when you put in the work.

On Saturday we brought actors into the studio and recorded the entire script.  Thank you Levi, Dave, Amber, and Megan.  We all doubled up on parts; I think I played at least 5 or 6 minor characters, and so did Murray and Curtis.  We're using this recording as a scratch track, and animating the storyboards so we know exactly the shots we want, and the pacing of the script becomes obvious.

Even without the animatics, it became obvious on Saturday that we have to make some changes to our lead female character.  We've had all these discussions about who she is and what motivates her, and she is intriguing to us, but after we got done recording Murray and I couldn't believe what a poor job we've done of making that come across in the script.  She spends most of her time as the damsel in distress and she's just not interesting at all.

So we came up with some serious changes and I'm excited to see them play out.

But I'm so glad we're putting in the work on pre-production.  This is where it's easy and a lot cheaper.  I'm anxious to move on to casting and filming and making the movie, but all this prep work is invaluable.

Our Feature Presentation

  

After making this many short films, I'm long overdue for making my first feature.  So here it is.

Murray Triplett and I banged our heads together for months.  Rewrite after rewrite, we kept going back and diagramming out the entire story, questioning everything, bumping up the action, giving every character quirks and flaws, making sure every dialogue scene had something interesting going on at the same time.

Now I'm excited.

Because this script is good enough to put money behind and devote a couple of years of my life to seeing it all the way through theatrical release until it's sitting in your Netflix queue.

You can follow some of the details on Murray's blog at http://www.wishplay.com and I'll have a Facebook page together for the movie in the near future.

And we still need a killer title.  Suggestions are welcomed.