I mentioned in an earlier update that casting women in the movie was proving difficult as they tend to be a lot more image concious than men. Yesterday was a perfect example of that. I've had the camera at the store a lot lately as I shoot coverage and insert shots. The idea is to get used to shooting the store, get used to the wide angle lense and hopefully come up with some shots that I can use when I get to the editing stage. Yesterday the camera was on the tripod, looking down on a lottery machine. It was a very tight shot, showing just a small section of the machine. You couldn't tell that from the other side of the counter though. The wide angle lense is pretty damn big and it catches people's attention. Particularly when it is pointed in their direction. One woman caught sight of it as she entered the store and practically flattened herself to the counter to avoid it seeing her. It was all I could do not to fall down laughing, while simultaneously assuring her that she was not being filmed. That was the most severe reaction from a customer to the camera's presence but hardly the only one. I probably answered more questions about the project than on any previous day.
This brings me to a different topic, which is how people react to my plan. Mostly, it doesn't seem to compute. I tell people I'm going to make a movie and the response is either "Really?" or "Why?" Both questions tend to be intoned in the same way you would respond to someone telling you their intention to fly to the moon in a spit powered-rocket. They look at me like I'm crazy. The fact that I am purely amused by this reaction says that I am either A) Supremely confident, B) Delusional, or C) Batshit crazy. People seem genuinely confused by this making a movie idea. Not that I can blame them. Making a movie is not something that we tend to think of as an activity for normal people. Movies are made by those people way over there in Hollywood, and they ain't like us. But then again, most people in film making didn't start with a connection to the business. Most of them came from ordinary places, following a dream obsessively until they had a career. That obsession is what drives me. I love movies down to the very core of my being. I've spent most of my life feeling somewhat out of place in whatever I chose to do. Working on making a movie doesn't make me feel that way. It just makes me happy. Clearly it's what I want to do. Now the trick is to just do it and do it well enough that someone will want to pay me to do more of it.
One successful thing this week was test shooting an entire scene from the script. It's a very quick scene with only one actor, so I played the part myself, shooting all the shots on a tripod. The point was to make sure that my shot list was giving me adequate coverage of a scene for the editing process. Remarkably, it did. When I took the footage back to my computer it cut together flawlessly. I still have to shoot it again though as I didn't bother to light the scene so it's pretty dark and grainy. That and my acting sucks.
Apart from the little bits of shooting, I'm mostly trying to fill out the cast and finishing up a shot list. I think I've found a candidate for the biggest part. Now I just have to convince this person to do it. Another challenge is working up the nerve to ask an actual professional actor to play a role. This is the only actor I know, someone you've undoubtedly seen on TV before, although not recently. As I said last week, at the core of this project is curing myself of shyness. If this move doesn't help, nothing will.
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