Pre-Production Blog Post 2/28

Once again, I've begun working on the pre-production stage of another film. Currently, I've felt that I have had a lack of ideas that I wanted to really pursue for films. It also felt like if I did have an idea, I wouldn't be able to stretch it out into a full film. However, over the past couple weeks I've managed to come-up with a decent idea that I think will make a decent little short film. The following is a collection of the pre-production work for this next film.

Concept

The concept that I have for this film involves a briefcase that when opened, releases a random event and resets time back to a set time. The briefcase is given to the protagonist with instructions to not open it. As we can expect, curiosity gets the best of the protagonist as he opens the case. The film then progresses as the case is constantly opened, it's contained chaos being let out, and time returning to back to just right after the case was received. After coming up with this concept I felt that it would be a good foundation that would allow me to creatively try new effects and techniques that wouldn't be too complicated or demanding. The film does still have a 3 Act structure, but the concept of the case and the scenarios it creates is the main focus of the story.

Storyboard

Prior to finalizing the film's concept, I had begun to storyboard some basic dialogue scenes such as the one that takes place in the opening of the film. Since then, I've worked to storyboard a few examples of the case being opened. I only have a few of these scenes storyboarded so far but I do anticipate that I will end up coming up with more different scenarios of the case being open and chaos being released. Attached below is the first draft I had of how the concept of opening the case and time being rewound would look like.

Script

The current draft of the script isn't very long or detailed which I don't really see as a bad thing. With the focus of the film mainly acting as a set-up to create visually interesting and comedic moments, the script doesn't necessarily have to be what drives the progression. I've always struggled with writing good dialogue as I've said before, but I feel that my script sounds like it won't really cause any problems. Both the beginning and the end of the script are the areas with the most dialogue since I expect to do most of the Act 2 storytelling visually. Attached below is the first page of the script which tells all the "need to knows" of the film (dead dad, briefcase, protagonist)

What Next?

Currently, I am just planning on acting as all the parts within the film and shooting it at my home and garage. This, like my last film, should make things a lot easier production wise. Despite this, depending on scheduling and how big the scope of the film grows to be, I might end up incorporating the help of maybe another actor or two in order to expand the film. However, this does depend greatly on how busy I am due to Musical season beginning to pick-up pace. With the state of the world getting better and better, I do hope that maybe I can do one more film later this year with other people. Even if that isn't a possibility, I do think that this film and any other ones I work on this year will go well as long as I keep working hard and don't lose focus.