The Diary of A Horror Film Maker - Day 3

WOW!!!

What can I say but wow. Day three has been a good one, despite a few hiccups with the pour of my espresso machine. Damn the hot weather and its affect on the bean's structure!


The late morning on a hot day involved sitting out on the deck, large jug of water, constant double shot flat whites, and of course, my ever favourite Scene Index Cards. Although blank, I guess that just makes them index cards. But not for long...

As i briefly mentioned yesterday, saying my story out loud helped shaped not only my visual thoughts of the film, but the overall feel and pace of it. Well today I spent 4 hours out on the deck and plotted the first two acts of my film. (course, handwriting for four hours can get rather tedious, so using the cards on the fantastic free Celtx program works exactly the same).

And damn its actually good!!!

Not to take anything away from how I felt about it the previous two days, but I really didn't see it going as well as it did today. To quote ol Big Kev(RIP), 'I'm Excited!' All that's left to plot out now is the final act, which my wife and I have just run through and now I'm even more excited about plotting that out tomorrow!

The rest of the afternoon was spent on a location recce. Again, things are looking up. Found (and photographed) some fantastic locations, all in dense bushland yet close enough to the road for our production vehicles (actually that's pretty much just my mum's caravan- maybe i should ask her first...) and each location had a great spot to add tension to the film. And in each location, I am of course referring to the five bushwalks I thought I"d wait til it was 35 degrees to go on! So tomorrow I'll be writing up the third act and squeezing a few more scenes into act two, courtesy of said locations.

As I just mentioned, the day ended with a reading of the scene cards, followed by yet another discussion/argument about some of the finer points. But the end result, besides an empty bottle of sparkling red and some tasty caesar salads, is a better rounded out concept and streamlined story, with a more realistic villain.

But wait there's more...

Um, actually, not really, I just always wanted to say that. But tomorrow should see the completion of the index cards and hopefully a trial film shoot of one of the trick shots. And maybe some more gathering of cast, crew and funds.

Now to just try to ignore the ideas racing through my head, see if this caffeine will ever leave my system, and try and get some sleep...