After much conversation, I convinced my wife to back the funding for a short for my next project: Domestique. My goal is to film a 5-7 minute short at end of August this year, then to use it as a form of advertising to interest investors in funding the feature. My arm-waving goal is to film the feature next summer, but who knows how ridiculously over optimistic that is (well, I do; and it is – but a man gotta dream).
I’ve been assembling a team and have the lead actors lined up, a DP, an editor, am ‘recycling’ John as the sound guy (swapping the use of our property for filming his shorts) and a couple of other guys who said they’d like to be involved in the project.
I thought about detailing my thoughts on why I think this is a good investment (insofar as any movie is a good investment – most are horrible), but my paranoia won’t let me. Not at this time. Perhaps once I’ve got some meaningful investors on board and the prospects of it being greenlit are good (or, contrariwise, in a few years when I given up), but even though I know ‘nobody’ reads my blog, I don’t want to create any reason for competitors to my project, but with deeper pockets, to decide to create something. Silly? Of course. But creatives tend to be silly.
An amusing? note on the short: I expected to film a bike racing story with, you know, actual bike racing. So I got a quote for insurance and to close the road. Bad news: the combined quotes match my whole budget! Now I have to figure out how to film a movie about bicycle racing without any actual racing. Conferring with the DP and editor, along with input from others, I feel fairly good that I can wind up with something that looks good enough for the purpose, but I was really hoping to practice some filming techniques in the short that I could apply to the feature.
Why not ‘guerilla‘ it? Well, if anything bad happens, then it’s on me and I don’t fancy that financial and reputation risk. But, at least as important, I’ll be using SAG’s Short Project Agreement for the shoot (because there are some SAG actors I want to work with and intend to use for the feature, assuming it gets funded) and I feel quite certain if they knew I was operating without proper insurance they’d blackball me.
Stay tuned for more on the journey called Domestique.
