Faltering Steps Forward on Two Stories and a Film - 2011 June 26

The Crying Woman

I did a little writing on The Crying Woman this week. I’m about a quarter of the way through the first draft. I haven’t really filled in the outline yet. I have done most of the easy stuff. My original plan was for a film similar to Before Sunrise. I’ve decided to do it as a short story first.

The idea is for a long conversation. It is a challenge for me to do that. I want to maintain interest for the audience so I need characters they can have empathy for. I think I’ve got two good characters that change in the course of the story. They also both have secrets that they may or may not reveal.

I am stuck on what they will talk about. I know the general thrust of what they want to say, but for most of the story they talk around what they really want to say. I need to come up with topics that allow them to say what they want to with out actually saying it. I did that in the part I’ve written and I think it worked well.

The Gladstone Barrier

I got the first draft of the story done this week. I’ll need to revise it quite a lot though. Overall it is longer than I want it to be, but the last part of the story is shorter than I want it to be.

It has been a hard for me to write it. Partly it is because I draw on some personal experiences. I’ve done that before in other projects, like Line of Taxis, but I usually find a way to distance myself. This is much closer to me.

While I wrote it I started to apply some of the techniques I’d read about writing dialogue. As a result, some of the early parts of the story are really in a different style. I think I’ll need to toss some of the early parts out and rewrite from scratch.

$100 Film Festival Film

In 2012 the $100 Film Festival celebrates its 20^th year. Melanie Wilmink at the CSIF contacted me about making another film for the festival. I hadn’t planned to do that again, but since I have 800 feet (244 meters) of 16mm film in my fridge I decided I’d give it a shot.

I got in touch with Howard Horwitz, who was one of the other filmmakers in the first festival. We agreed to collaborate on a project. We’ve come up with some ideas and I expect that as we progress the project will evolve. I used a similar approach when I made The Fence.

This week I started to get ready to shoot some film. I contacted the Niagara Custom Lab in Toronto about to make sure I could get the film I have developed and printed. I got a bit of a scare, until I realized that I’d sent them the wrong information about the film I have. Next week I’ll be in to the CSIF to talk about equipment. I plan to shoot a test roll first. It has been a long time since I last shot film.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog