School's Out Forever

Yeah. I graduated almost a week ago now. It was kinda bogus because I don't get my degree for another 3 weeks. The registrar can't even give me a proof of graduation to show my apartment people so I can get out of my lease for another two weeks. But I'm leaving Tuesday anyway.

I'm so caught up in moving and trying to get settled back in Shreveport that I haven't had much time to focus on GOS. Hopefully once I get there I won't have the continuous distractions I've had lately.

The good news is that we have a substantial budget. I've got $13,000 saved up so far. That's almost 3 times the budget of my last film, and I'm still 8 months from production.

I saw this quote on a friend's facebook status and it sums up exactly what I think directing is about:

"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I don't even know who that person is, but I like the way he thinks.

Despite being busy I have at least crafted a new outline for the next draft of GOS which is a decent departure from the first draft. I've made the relationships between the three main characters a lot closer and therefore hopefully more intense and dramatic.

That fairytale warm-up from my last post is also gaining momentum and may become problematic in scale in terms of interrupting pre-production for GOS. Either way I'm very excited about both and I can't wait to start making movies again. I've got a lot of pent up filmmaking energy right now.

Full-time Filmmaker

In 9 days, I will have graduated college and will then officially be a full-time filmmaker for at least the next year. This is the most exciting thing ever.

I don't think I've even touched the GOS script since my last post. Finals are distracting. I've got many new ideas though.

Moviesauce even has a new short based on a fairty tale poem that might serve as a warm up in the fall with the new equiment I'm getting for GOS.

I'm very curious about how much money I'm going to be starting with. I have 3k right now, and I'm wondering how much I might be accumulating for graduation. On one hand people get cars and trips to Europe for graduation so it could be a substantial amount, but on the other, when people just give you money I feel like they're less inclined to give as much as they might spend on a trip.

I know we're still way off from making the movie, but the closer it gets, the more the reality of the whole thing sets in. You start thinking about what all you have to do for such a big project and you feel lazy until you start getting it done.

It starts

It technically started a while ago. If you want to get really technical, it started around fall of 2005. That's when I started developing the idea for the first short film "Getting Outer Space", which I shot in the summer of 2006. It's viewable here (under films): www.evanfalbaum.com

Now it's April, three years later. I've been working on adapting the short into a feature length screenplay since the fall. I've been working on it for at least 6 months already.

I've assembled a partial cast and crew, though at this point I'm just trying to get through the final stretch of my education. I'll hopefully be graduating in 5 weeks and then it's full steam ahead on this film.

I don't plan to shoot until roughly January of 2010 so I've got quite a while to work everything out, and I intend to use that time fully.

One of the first things aside from continuing to refine the script is going to be to get a website up where I can maybe transfer these blog posts to as well as host other stuff that documents the process of making this movie. I want the production to be fairly transparent and being that it will be an extremely important project for me, I want to document everything pretty well. In case I can't shoot a proper "making of", I want to have this production diary.

But if you're looking for insights into the script or anything, you won't be getting them. I don't want to sacrifice the integrity of the film by saying too much. I just want the way I do it to be remembered.

I'd like to help build interest in the project too by posting frequent updates and insights into what we're doing and hopefully that will help to build somewhat of a fanbase of people that maybe feel like they too have some sort of stake in the project. I'd like to do a web series or something that documents it as well. Who knows what will happen at this point. That's the fun of the first post. I can look back and laugh at how clueless I was on day one...even though this isn't really day one.

But in a year from now hopefully I'll have a completed film that is something I really proud of. And that's when I'll look back through these posts.

I'm rambling now. At this point I don't think it's important to update more than once a week if that so don't get too anxious if there is in fact anybody reading this at this point.