Monday, August 18, 2008

And so it begins (building Leading Ladies)

After three years of hard work, Erika has finally finished writing her screenplay with her friend Jen.

It's fantastic (and those of you who know me know I'm a pretty tough critic when it comes to stuff like this).

So now I guess we're gonna make this thing! We talked it over for quite a while, and decided making the film would be more fun (?!?!) than just selling the screenplay, so here we go. If you'd have told me a year ago that we'd be shooting our own feature film in the summer of 2009, I doubt I'd have believed you, but here I am, starting work on a set so we can shoot our first teaser, to help us garner some funding to shoot the actual film.

Here you can see how it begins:


I used my superior thrift shopping techniques to score some materials to put together a bathroom vanity with double basins. I'm constructing the walls so we can remove individual panels to get various camera shots.

Brian and Tim of Imperial Sport Bikes have been extremely generous and are letting us use their bike shop as a sound stage (they're even offering up their trailer to help me haul this stuff around, and Brian's going to grip for the first shoot). I drove down last week to check it out, and I think we're a go. 28 foot ceilings, no windows... should be perfect.

We contacted a dancer that Erika met in Chicago, and she kindly agreed to a screen test, so we plunked down the cash to fly her out for the shoot. She and one of Erika's students will be our principal actors. Erika has already choreographed the scene, so we are pretty close to being ready to go.

Our DP, Jeff McCutcheon sent out the film equipment, and it arrived today (Xmas!).

We've also got storyboards coming together from our good friend Troy Carlson. We may have some of those available for viewing soon (if you're lucky!).

Keep an eye on the blog for further developments.

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