Actor Growth

What an interesting day this was. Now for this MAMM competition as you all know I entered into it pretty late with a team that was kind of formed in the last minute based on contacts. The person that we decided who was directing and also helping to produce it was very energetic initially and had all these big ideas. Of course, we are all technically amateurs when it comes to it.

Now one thing that I thought was extremely crucial in making a film is having items like a storyboard. As well, it should be important to have all shoots and locations marked down for everyone to see. Considering there is fighting in this film too, it should be even more crucial. The funny thing is, the person refuses to do it as he believes it is a waste of time and that he has it all in his head.

Apparently he has been researching about trying to get like a film permit to shoot outside and in the meantime everything from finding the right lighting and sound equipment isn’t even complete and is way behind. I then received a call today on how apparently the permit is extremely expensive and that he would need me to use my credit card for it. I was pretty blunt in saying that wasn’t important as we could technically shoot everything indoors.

Again, it seemed like he was persisting and eventually I try to get him to create the storyboards and to write a copy of the shooting schedule and send it to me. Now here is the very interesting part. He then complained that if I mention that again he is going to quit. Still, I persisted that we need to be organized.

When he said that though, that made me feel like how he was trying to find a technical reason to get out in many ways. That’s how I felt anyways. I personally hate that type of thinking as just like in any business per se you have to expect hard times and in my opinion what makes a great leader is finding solutions for problems. Again, might not be the case, but that’s how it seemed.

He still didn’t send me any schedule breakdowns and instead left me a message later saying that apparently it takes two weeks to get a permit and therefore it looks like we can’t enter the festival. Funny thing was, I talked to him on the phone explaining how we could technically shoot the whole film indoors by adjusting the script. As well, if we needed an outdoor scene one of our teammates is a film student so we can do it at his school campus.

The responses he gave me was kind of a “out of excuses” expression I thought. So, while he didn’t sound super motivated, we are still doing it. This is not a fun experience so far I must say and in many ways I’m afraid the film will turn out very bad unless I take initiative to handle more roles. So far though, I am taking initiative to have a rehearsal with the other actors and will storyboard at least the fight scene elements.