Saturday, May 27, 2006
can't stop won't stop
As i'm sitting in front of my laptop (yes it's an ibook) ,alone (koko is with his children at some children's day celebration) i realized how much i enjoy this breaking down the script thing.See, to succeed the production of a movie, you need INFORMATION. Not only having it ALL but also being able to give very specific ones on a very short notice ("by the way, how many time does Character appear in Location during Nightime ?and Producer, it will be nice if i also knew if it requires live sound and what he wears" said Other Producer just before looking at his watch and adding "ASAP").
So you take all the information you have from the script, from your dear writter, from our dear director and put it in an ubiquious appleworks file and then think hard, very hard about what may be asked at ANY POINT and how to properly and quickly extract the required info ANYTIME...
And of course, it should be comprehensible to me but also to anyone else...
Ahh "work as conversation" as Tom Peters defined it in "Crazy Times Call For Crazy Management" (yes, people, sometimes i take breaks from african litterature, semi historical latin american novels, atlases and russian artsy filmmakers memoirs)..
So yeah, that's the only way to properly prepare the shooting of a movie when your director is 6 times zones away.. But then again, the script, past (saved and classified) conversations and ongoing email exchanges aren't fast enough for me to get the info in the first place.. so trust me, if there is a "next project" (and i believe there will be), i already plan to spend the equivalent of the budget of TOO MUCH BEAUTIFULL WOMEN on transcontinental plane tickets, accomodation for emmergency production meetings in random places (Praia is equidistant between Boston and Lagos, isn't ?).
But for now i'm back to my on-task.. and somehow thinking about the last time i did it for a feature film (or rather script).. it was quite early in the process so it was the "All Out" one, you know, no second-guessing, the script said "large view of greenland's icy immensities", you put "helicopter or plane" in one of the boxes. Only god knows how much fun i had doing that, and how much i wanted to be there, in greenland, iceland or wherever sitting in front of a laptop and doing "stuff" that would have helped the beautiful script i read and re-read and re-read again become an actual movie.. sadly, the process of production (especially pre-production) takes a helluva long time in the very formal European Union.. so... hmm... my (very modest) participation ended up a while ago... the rest of this particular story will be told latter.
now what i wanted to say is that, even if the actual production of TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMEN may seem a little rushed, i'm actually happy we decided to "just do it" (or some may have forced that decision on others, lol).
I didn't want to have another tale about a missed opportunity.
aflakete the wunderkid at 12:01 PM
1 Comments
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at 1:13 AM
EKENYERENGOZI Michael Chima said... You are very good writer and you rock.
If you are really a writer of screenplays and you are serious in getting grants to produce your movies in Nigeria, let me know soon.
God bless.