A lot of Progress, A lack of Posting

So.... haven’t posted in a long time. My apologies. A lot has happened in the last few days. I’ll try and keep things chronological.

On Thursday I was taken down into the tunnels by facman for a location scout. It was awesome. Not only were the guys that took us excited about helping us but also they were always suggesting places we should check out. Doing the little breakdown sheets and having a little list of props, sets, etc was great to have in advance. it made things run a lot smoother. I went down with my DP, Dan, and my hopefully on set sound mixer, Daniel swier. Dan brought a 3chip camera and got 35min of footage. It looks great. We found some really cool places that will work really well for the film. Daniel took a digital camera and took about 15 pictures. They’re pretty cool. Maybe we'll put them up on the website. I’m not sure. The facman guys told us we could contact them to do another location scout if we needed. Which we might do depending on the screenplay and the changes that take place in the next few months. Not sure yet.

I’m starting to get feedback by potential crew, friends, and actors about the screenplay. It’s interesting the split between the dialogue. Some people love it and some people hate it. I like it so I’m not sure if I’m going to be changing too much just yet. We’ll see what other people think.

A friend in Texas, whom used to go to school with me, read the script and liked it so much that he's gonna try to come here to help film it. I told him to be careful because I would hate for him to come here and us not make the film. Not that I think that's going to happen but there’s still a lot of details that need to be worked out. Like reslife and the police for two.

I had a meeting with Chris Lamont yesterday. It went really well. Chris is the head of the phoenix film foundation and he founded the phoenix film festival and is the executive director. Chris and me have a history of a couple of years from projects and me taking some of his classes at school. I wanted to meet with him for a few reasons. One I wanted him to read the script because he's a friend with an actor I want to play officer Navarro. If I approached the actor outright I don't think he’d read the script because it's a student film that he wouldn't get paid for. I figure that if Chris reads it and likes it then the actor might read it. Hopefully if he reads it he'll like it and take the part. That’s the plan at least. The other reason I met with Chris is I wanted to start a dialogue with him and let him know I’m taking on the project. I’d like to use him as an advisor and I’d like him to find out about the project form me rather than someone else. I’m really excited that he's willing to read the script and give me notes. It will be really valuable when attracting people to the project to say that Chris Lamont approves of the project and liked the script. That is if he likes the script right? One of the things he told me right of the bat is that I need to cut 45 pages from the screenplay. He said that movies over 90min with out any names attached are unattractive to distributors. We’ll see what he says after the he reads the 135page version. I mean I know it needs to come down but 90 pages? Jeez. That’s a lot. 45 pages?

I’m going to start working on the next rewrite diligently tomorrow. It’s the most important thing to get done next so I can get a board and budget ready to meet with reslife and the police. I need to secure those things to officially green light the picture. I’ve also got to email the scenes to ihop to see if they'll let me shoot in their restaurant. If not I’ll have to find somewhere else and quick.