Marching Band

Today we had a meeting with the director of the S. High School Marching Band, talking to him about getting in the studio and scheduling time to get down for the shoot next semester. It was nice, though I spent most of the time feeling self conscious about my disgustingly bad hat hair. Very professional.

A, who’s doing our music, played the stuff he’d written, including the mitti version of the actual song that the marching band students will play. It sounds fantastic. Seriously. It’s very good stuff and I think that impressed the director a lot.

The director seemed enthused, which was good, though he was very abrupt with us about the whole scheduling thing. I mean, there were logistics to work out, especially transporting about 40 students to and from their school, feeding, buses, etc, but that’s _my_ job, to worry about that. We’re eating the cost of the buses and probably going to feed the students, which is a logistics thing for me to work out with Bob, joy.

I also need to get started on the legal stuff soon. I’ll probably do that over my winter break, get into contact with people about contracts, permits, release forms, et al. I know Bob has a contact of a lady in Hollywood, someone who works for the SAG or some other union, who can be a consultant for us to getting _all_ the legal matters worked out for a flat fee. I hope that we can, otherwise I forsee a lot of phone calling.

More later.

Contacting crew

I fired off an email after the meeting, asking everyone to please email me back and tell me specifically what they’re interested in doing with the movie. This serves a twofold purpose.

One is that now I have a list together (sort of) of everyone who came to the meeting and I can talk to Bob and J today about where we’re going to put everyone. I think that was a little genius of me, then Bob doesn’t have to try to meet with every single person and have a conversation about what they want to do. He’s already talked to them about it and we had the meeting so this saves us time and we can just assign everyone their role and move from there.

And the second purpose is more for me than anything. I want to put together email lists for all the small groups we’re going to have working on this such as everyone interested in working with the film crew, people interested in acting, people interested in lighting and sound, et al. That way A. They have their own email group list and B. If Bob needs to get into contact with one group about something, all he has to do is email me and I’ll email them.

I feel kind of clever, especially considering I’ve never worked on movies before. I mean, it’s intimidating working with so many others who have worked on Bob’s films in the past, it makes me feel like the new kid on the block trying to impress everyone else. I keep trying to be perfect so that they’ll accept me as Assistant Producer, so that I can impress them and gain their trust and confidence. Bob was pleased though, with how quickly I emailed everyone out, he thinks the idea was good, and I’m glad for that. Though it’s not hard to impress him, he’s very enthusiastic about things!

More later

Crew Meetings!

So we had a crew meeting today. Our director and lighting/art direction guys were there, M and S, as was our lead actor! I finally got to meet him, he was a nice enough guy though he seemed rather nervous about the fact that he’s been cast as the LEAD ACTOR. He’s not acted in anything before as a principle, so he’s -rather- nervous. I think we’ve got him an assistant though, a guy I know named D____y is interested in acting, he’s a theatre student here at school and he’s maybe going to be the assistant to ML, our lead actor. He was like, “So what would an assistant do,”

So I explained to him “Oh you know, he’d get you food if you needed it, water, anything you’d need on set, he’d be hooked up to us to know when to get you on set, etc, or like, if you suddenly needed a doctor’s appointment while you’re in the middle of the shoot, he could do it for you.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I’d need that.” He looked mortified at the suggestion of someone making a doctor’s appointment for him. He’d make a terrible diva.

So anyway, Dr. Bob had some of the professional crew guys go around the room and introduce themselves, so everyone got to meet M and S, our official shooting senior crew guys, they’re awesome. They’re fraternal twins who made their own production studio as college students back at this school in early 2000, and have made a successful career with it from that. They do the shooting for Bob on every production that he’s done so far, which is awesome because they A. Know what the heck they’re doing. B. Do -great- work. and C. They connect well with Bob, they get his vision. I’m happy to work with them, honestly. It just ups our production on the scale in terms of value and aesthetics. They’re going to be truly amazing. They’ve done some major production work in the past, like shooting various commercials for different people around town, like some banks and some other places, and they’ve done a couple music videos. And next week they’re screening a premier of the movie they’ve just made. It promises to be great, and I _will_ attend.

We also got to meet AL who’s doing our music. I’ve listened to both the demo tracks he’s done for us (Bob LOVES showing it off *g*) and they are super good, I think with the right mixing, adding some power behind it, changing up a little, it could be some seriously great music. I mean, the Dirge song, which has got an interesting creepy carnival type sound, comes off as something truly Tim Burton-esque (Sorry, I’ve forgotten the other guy you mentioned, Bob/AL/etc!) It’s going to be great, I think.

And then…I think we’ve found our senior sound crew, the two girls who came for that, both grad students, are super excited about sound, they have a lot of experience working with stuff in school and I think that if I talk to Bob, they’re going to probably be our senior sound girls. As a project, they’ve been working on stripping the sound off of one of Bob’s other movies (That one of the girls worked on actually!) and remixing it for a grad project. The movie is called “Wait”, a very powerful short film about a man who has just lost his son, who’s a soldier, to the War. There’s a scene at the end (spoiler alert!) where the father shoots himself in suicide, due to grief. And the good natured girls have had to see this 37 times. They said “By the end, we were trying to decide if it was a comedy or a drama! We kept laughing at the part where he’s crying going ‘This is so wrong! Oh my gosh, he keeps squeaking! No, so wrong! But sooo funny!” They said they hadn’t slept in four days during the sound remix and there was one part where one of the girls added a string orchestra sound, and the other goes “Is he in heaven now? It’s so beautiful!” They’re very dedicated to their jobs. I look forward to working with them.

I’m just excited! We’ve got the bare bones of a true crew now, I’ve got names and email/phone numbers for about 20 people. I’m going to put together a contact email list and then have smaller groups for just sound, just camera work, etc, so that the people in charge can get the names/email of the people they’ll be working with, AND so if Bob wants to communicate something to them, all he has to do is email me, and I’ll email them.

I am super duper excited, as always. More later!

Callback stress

Two in one day! This is madness, Keener! O you silly, sick Keener, you.

Anyway. So, after I post I email everyone about the crew meeting on my list, and call Bob.

“You’ve started calling our callback people, right?”

Now, the callbacks aren’t until the week after next, so I’ve been atypically putting it off, for the time being.

“Um…yes, yes I have.”

“Great! I got a call from G about this other group that would like to audition for us, so I said ‘the more, the merrier!’”

Oh. Thank you so much Bob. Seriously, I don’t think I thanked you enough for the fact that we’ve decided to have *seven* auditions in one night already. Eight now apparently. It’s stressful being there for hours and hours watching auditions. They tend to run together a little in my head after a bit. But, Keener shall soldier through. It’s one night, thankfully, not three this time. (Though we only needed two since we crammed everyone in on the second night). I don’t mean to sound whiney, I love this job hugely, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just ready to be past auditions, I think. We’ve been thinking/planning/having/scheduling/discussing auditions since early October at this point.

Movies get done in meetings, I’ve found. More later.

Crew meeting

Silly, sick Keener has been forgetful lately. We’ve got a list together, of people to call for various reasons, we’ve got a crew meeting next Monday, audition callbacks and Justin’s calling the people we decided not to see again, and while I have managed to remember to call the people on my list, I have yet forgotten again to send out an email about the meeting. I shall do it today!

So we’re doing a crew interest meeting on Monday night, trying to get some barebones of an actual helper crew together. We have about a dozen names on the list but probably only five or six will actually come and/or be interested. I’m hoping we’ll have more than that but at this point, sloppiness on my part might mess that up a little. Silly, sick and sloppy, that’s me right now.

We’ll have audition callbacks the week after next. At this point we have probably gotten our choir but we’re not positive on the soloists. It’s tricky, getting just the right sound. Like for our main Femal singer, we need maternal, but we need sassy. We need a powerful voice but a soft touch…it’s tricky. We just need someone with a good voice and hella acting skills. Which…kind of hard to get in the middle of Nowhere, Tennessee. We’ll look in Nashville, which could be helpful, but we’re operating on zero budget, so that eliminates lots of options there.

Anyway, this is intended to be simply a short post. More later.

Shamefaced and contrite

So I missed my meeting with Bob today. Why? My own fault. I have mono and I’m trying hard to still do school, etc and keep on top of everything, not to mention I’m still trying to have a social life too. So I’m sick and tired, trying to act like I’m not and I pay the price by getting a migraine headache that keeps me doped up on pills and feeling like I’m in a drugged sleep all day. I feel massively irresponsible.

I suppose the right thing to do would be to email Bob and explain the situation and ask his forgiveness. I’m a little too embarassed to call, to be honest.

Hiring crew

Okay, I wrote a big post and it got deleted. Here’s version 2.0 for you guys.

So I went to Bob’s office today for a few minutes and we discussed the things we have upcoming. The next task on the list is to hire additional crew. See, what’s happening is that we already have a professional film crew for the shoot, that we’ve hired, but we’ll be hiring university students from the school to assist the crew. It’s an opportunity for them to work with professional film-makers and for us to have cheap labor. *g* I’m relieved, to be honest. I can’t wait to have other people working on this project to delegate to, I love my job but it can be overwhelming. I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t want to do it all by myself either. I mean, I’ll have to be able to trust my crew though. I have issues with that, if I feel like there’s reason not to trust people to get a job done, I don’t want to give them the job to do in the first place. It’s just that I trust myself to get it done whereas, I don’t have an easy time trusting another person to do it.

Speaking of trust, if I’m honest with myself…I’m not sure I like J, the other PA on the film. I mean, he’s a nice enough guy, I just feel like he rubs me the wrong way for some reason. Part of that, honestly, is what happened the other night.

It was after auditions and already late and I should have been studying for the test I had the next day but J said he and a couple of the guys who were doing filming for us were going to be going to his place off campus to talk about stuff for Film Guild. I asked if we could hang out and he said I could come over and I assumed at some point we WOULD be hanging out. Instead, it was simply a ‘meeting of the minds’ for Film Guild and afterwards J went with his friend to his friends’ dorm to play video games. I thought that it was implied we would hang out but apparently not. It was my fault for not being clear on what was going on but I was still bugged by it, too.

I know I should be mature and handle things in an adult manner, get over my petty hurt feelings, talk to J and tell him that I’m having issue with him, work it out and move on. But I just feel a little bit mad right now, at myself for wasting precious study time and at J for being kind of weirdly callous (there was a few other things that happened that night too that made me wonder about him). I’ll suck it up soon and talk to him, I don’t like holding grudges, but for now I’m going to be stupid I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow Bob and I will meet again, after my morning class, to discuss casting. We also talked, today, about changes on the script, which we’ll probably discuss tomorrow as well. The script keeps changing, all the time, being rewritten with additional scenes, different dialogue, etc and I really think that all the changes simply keep making it a better and better story. I wouldn’t say there’ll ever be a final script, just a most recent copy, until we go to shoot that is. The story will continue evolving and changing though, even through the editing process until the very end, final product. It’ll be really good though, because of all the changes.

So, that’s all for now, I think. There’ll be more after tomorrow.

Till then…

Auditions and upcoming tasks

So, I’m sure you’re all wondering how auditions went. Well…I’m going to avoid saying much yet since Bob and I haven’t met with our other guy to discuss things but needless to say they were good and interesting, and there’s a lot of talent where I live. We’re going to have callbacks probably, to ask a few people to come back and sing for us, and do some script reading, and we may have found our choir, but again, we haven’t had a meeting yet to discuss things.

In other news, the next project on the list is to get our funding (which Bob is working on), get legal stuff sorted out (such as contracts when we actually pick our cast, release forms, union contracts for the crew, permits, etc), and to start hiring our additional crew. We’ll actually have a professional crew for the shoot but we’ll hire students to assist them and us. That will probably be sometime in late November or January.

We’re also working (rather, Bob is working) on getting the songs written, getting music to the lyrics and so forth. Once that’s done, we’ll get our cast into the studio to record the songs.

It’s only going to get busier from here, folks!

Auditions!

Well, auditions start tonight. We’re going to be auditioning six choirs, so far. What we’ll be looking for is how well they sing, obviously, their overall ability to harmonize and how good their vocal control is, and of course, their overall look and feel, how well we’d think they’d fit in with what we have in mind for our movie. I made up the judging sheet this morning which was kind of interesting, since I was basically told that I’m totally in charge of auditions, I organized it (though Bob did a lot to get the PR going on it with me) I took the calls for it and I made up the judging and sign in sheets (we want to be able to do call backs of any particular persons we liked seperate from their choirs).

I’m glad though, of the experience I’m getting from all this. Even though it’s not a true internship, I’m basically doing as much work as would be in an internship (though over 2 semesters), so I feel like I’ll have that experience at least, when I graduate. See, at another university I attended, they recommended that you have 2-3 internships (in my field that is) before you graduated. The idea was that you could really get a good idea of what you’d be doing and so forth in several different areas of that field. Well, I have an internship in radio next semester and I’m doing a lot of work with film-making, which translates to tv production, basically, so I’m getting experience on both sides here, which I’m really glad about.

There shall be more news after tonight. Be prepared for several updates this week!

If life is a three ring circus, I must be the clown

So I’ve got some news! We officially have an official business line. Let me tell you, it was a process getting it. I went to Sprint, hoping that they’d be able to use my old phone to set up a pay-as-you-go contract with me on it. The answer was a quick ‘no’, so I ended up having to buy a cheap and rather ugly Virgin Mobile phone (from Sprint, what the heck is up with that?) and I got a thing where I use a card to load up minutes onto the phone each month (200 minutes for $20, that’s a good deal, I think).

Well, I had to go to the library to use the computer in order to activate the phone. So I go in and I realize I’ve forgotten my wallet. (Oops, that’s driving without a license, ma’am. Sorry officer!) Which means no library card, which means I don’t have my card number to get on the computer. The library is awesome enough to give their patrons four hours of computer use a day, all you need is your card number to get on. (More time than even the most hardcore nerd could need. I’ve spent tons of time at the library and I don’t think I’ve ever needed to use up that whole allotment, though I’ve come close). Anyway, so I have to go to the desk and sheepishly ask for my card number and they need a photo ID for it. Ohh, snap. I don’t have my license either, fortunately I had my school ID, which is actually technically for a school out of the county but they accept it and I go on my merry way.

So I get on and I have to do 14 billion things to even start THINKING about activating the phone, let alone to actually get it working. I turn it on, and remember I’m in a library, and it goes off with the loudest beeps and boops I’ve been subjected to in ages. Since I keep my regular phone on vibrate all the time, I’ve forgotten how loud and annoying they can be. FInally, there’s only one step left, which is to dial in a complex series of numbers into the phone to tell the phone to activate itself. (I thought I’d already done that, what were the rest of the 14 billion steps for??) Well, as I dial the phone loudly beeps and boops merrily away and I can’t go out to the lobby to take the call, ma’am, I need to be on the computer so it can tell me the next forty steps to activating a cheap and ugly phone. So I finally get the number dialed in only to hear a loud voice tell me “We’re sorry, that number is incorrect, please activate your phone before use.” ….What? I thought I WAS activiating it?? After five more times of this, all the while I’m getting more paranoid that the librarians are going to come over with the police to haul me away for disturbing the peace, I finally decide to go to the lobby to try this again. I don’t exactly know what I did that time but it finally worked.Apparently Virgin Mobile is a big library patron…

Anyway, so it’s activated and now I have to load minutes onto it. I got a card from the sales guy which I have to go to the site and plug in a long string of randomly generated numbers to activate the card. I try it and no dice…it says that the card is already activated. I try again, thinking I might have typed it wrong. Again, nothing. By this point I’m sick of the whole process so I figure that maybe I already have the minutes on the phone, since the sales guy had to scan it in when I bought it. Nope, I bought another $20 worth of minutes online (which was really really not nice *frowns*) but I’m too tired of dealing with stupid technology to go back to the sales guy and complain I was scammed out of my minutes. I should have remembered Moscow Rule #9: Technology will always fail you.

So, on the other side of the camera, auditions are coming up next week and we’ve got several choirs signed up already. We’re going to meet on Friday and try to work out what all is going to happen and make sure we’re ready for next week. It’s been FUN doing the scheduling for the choir auditions. Well, it has been enjoyable, even though it’s sometimes a pain to be on the phone all day long playing phone tag with people, explaining the process over and over and trying to sort out a million details. Ah well, it’s been really interesting so far and a learning experience and I wouldn’t trade the job for anything.