Scripts and Deadlines

Today was fairly progressive, as far as Freshmen is concerned anyway. My homework for school on the other hand is not going so well, but that’s not what’s important…right? I had to work this morning at 8pm. When I got to work I played my game boy till about 9:30pm and then started working on the sp. I added a whole new plot line to the movie. It was inspired by my ride-a-long as well as something I just remembered that happened on campus 9 months ago. This girl was having a bad day and she was waiting for the bus when a mini-van pulled up and 2 guys jumped out in ski masks and kidnapped her. All the witnesses called the police. Two days later the girl called the police and told them that her friends pulled a joke on her to cheer her up. I think it’s a brilliant little thing that will be very funny in the movie. Writing the dialogue for the cops has become amazingly easier since my ride-A-Long I really have a good handle on the characters. One of the strange things about writing for the police is that I have to designer my own set of radio codes. So Tom533 stands for Officer Ashton and 25 stands for “meet with”. It’s gonna be interesting.

I brought the first 15 pages of the screenplay to the AFA screenwriting workshop today. It was Josh, Jeff and Chad. They really liked it. I think the best part of the reading was when Mike and Jeff jumped out the window. The readers stopped reading and were like “whoa, they jumped out the window?” They said exactly the way I want the audience to feel when they watch the movie. It got me excited. Chad was there to talk to me about a TV-show he’s looking into producing. I’m gonna help him out with it. It sounds cool. Maybe I’ll use it to test some night shooting with Dan or something. We’ll see. But Chad offered to help produce when things are more concrete. This makes me really excited because Chad’s the man when it comes to producing. He was the sole reason, aside from myself, the movie got made.

I got home about 5pm and have been doing some maintenance on my computer, moving files etc. I’m setting up a file structure for freshmen sense I’m starting to have so many versions of the script electronically. Every time I work on it I save it as a new file with the date in the file name. Like freshmen120305.scw. I also printed out a two calendars. One 2 page yearly calendar with the years 2006-2007. I then printed a 25 page monthly calendar from Dec05-Dec07. I used the yearly calendars as top sheets for my monthly calendars in my production binder. I then set these tentative deadlines for myself.

Dec15: Completed Rough Draft
Jan17: Completed Final Draft
Jan31: Board (Shooting Schedule) and Budget done.
Feb 14: Create and Lock in Production Team and set Production meeting schedule
Apr 15&16: General Call Auditions
Oct 6th-29th: Tentative Shooting Dates.