Are You There? Production diary 1

Sometimes things just align (pun intended;-) and the time is right.., I’ve been thinking and writing stories and screenplays for years now, but since a film made with Paul McParland won at the Supershorts Film Festival about eight years ago, I haven’t got myself organised to make another short. I just never had the facilities or opportunity… I’ve written lots, but I never focused my activities on making my own short film…

Until now.

Now that I’ve started the recording studio, I’ve managed to put together a small camera set up and through a few projects, have been back in contact with the local filmmaking community. Even so a few things happened within a short timescale, making this project possible and feasible.

The first was recording a fun “hidden extra” track with RJ Woolsey for his second CD… As RJ was acting in some local short film productions, we thought it would be fun to make a short film based on this extra track “Mafia wars.” This is ongoing and will be in pre-production as soon as the album is finished.

The next encouraging thing that happened was buying a Røde microphone and discovering the My Røde Reel international short film competition. Finding out about the competition set my mind wondering about entering. I’m sure I could make something? Five minutes? I can do that… But what could the premise of my story be? Where would we film it? Who could be in it?

My existing scripts and stories were too large in scale. My animation scripts wouldn’t suit a live action film. For a week, the only ideas that came to mind were too large for the budget (£0), timescale and, probably, the available crew. A week or so in limbo.

The final and biggest spark was a visit to a location in County Louth, Ireland. Myself and my brother, Patrick, went to a mountain where we would be filming for an educational film. When we got there I was blown away (almost literally! The camera and tripod were blown over at one point!)

Within two minutes of seeing the amazing location I had begun to develop the seeds of the story idea; On the drive to the location I started to come up with ideas….

Someone needed to come up here to use the antenna… Why? What would make them trek all the way up here…?

And so, even as we were shooting for the other film, the ideas were coming to me.
By 6 pm that day I had fleshed out the story a bit more and began the script.
The first step was creating a new project in Scrivener. If you don’t know Scrivener, go and check it out! It’s a total writing package available for Mac & pc and there’s possibly even an iOS version coming soon.

Scrivener allowed me to put my ideas down quickly; Its cork board view allows scenes to be easily moved around and tried elsewhere and it has a fabulous way of helping to organise your thoughts and research from right within your script project.
The first draft was written over the next few days. Again, Scrivener made formatting the script very easy. A plus for me, since I’m often very lazy and don’t format things correctly – since I was hoping to work with a few more experienced crew, I thought I had better do things correctly. Also, because the process is going to be documented and online, I thought we’d take less flak if I got it half-right. 😉 Another plus is that it’s going to be a learning experience for us all, especially me, who is used to winging things too often.

Next time: Style