Actor Growth

I’m really floored at the amount of potential support that is being offered as a result of the people who decided to take off on the film project. Especially too I actually emailed one of the festival coordinators about the situation and she has been so supportive in trying to find help for my team. I am very grateful for all of this.

As well, some people that I have contacted have offered to help too and so it looks like we could possibly have something going here. It’s just so amazing when I think about it. Let’s see where this goes.

Yup, I pretty much expected this. So the other producer/director has decided that he doesn’t want to do it anymore. At the same time, most of the people that he brought in specifically won’t be involved in it anymore as well.

So at this point, with the people who remain we all agree that there is no way we can do a very good job without more help as we relied on the person to follow through. We still have some crew and so fourth, but it is not enough. Therefore, what we have decided is that we all agreed that we were still interested in creating the film. If we can find help within 2 days then we will go ahead with the shoot. If not, we will simply withdraw from the festival.

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.

So it looks like we have a rough idea of the locations that we will be shooting in. Vancouver is apparently very expensive to get a permit and is way out of our budget considering this is more of a volunteer type of project for fun and experience.

I’m not too used to this as I normally just focus on the acting. Although, as mentioned before I did do film production in school and so that is helping me a lot. I also got to see the list of entrants for this festival contest and it looks like there is only one other team that is attempting the same genre as my group.

We have a pretty ambitious idea considering we are probably one of the few teams that got into this at pretty much the last minute. Should make it more impressive if we can pull it off despite the odds too.

So after scrambling a bit we came up with a quick presentation for the pitch session. The panel consisted of four women from various backgrounds and the session was videotaped apparently too. In general, the pitch session didn’t feel like it turned out too well in terms of getting the panel excited about our project as they seemed to question our ability to do so in many ways I felt.

Apparently in this competition too this pitch session is something entirely new and is suppose to count towards a significant portion of the score. It was also interesting as one lady told me that for the most part it is the same people who participated in this event. So, that makes me believe that we are going up against some more experienced film makers.

I’m actually pretty confident in our ability though and especially acting wise I hope to be able to do some really great scenes as one of the goals is to help break a stereotype in terms of the type of roles that people perceive that a Chinese actor in North America can play.

Well isn’t this turning out to be a little interesting. Looks like I am going to play a bigger role in terms of creating the script/story than I thought. Turns out that one of the team members has a birthday today and so they went out to celebrate it.

On top of that, the entire script isn’t complete yet and the pitch session is tomorrow. So, as a result I kind of took initiative and am writing the script myself right now. Understandable but kind of disappointing in many ways as I hope this isn’t going to happen in the actual filming where time wise people won’t give priority in this project.

Currently just thinking of a way to end the story and then hopefully the rest of the team members will get back and we can finalize tonight as we will have to prepare for the pitch session.