Week Two
The pace began picking up early in the week, as we created and then refined the pitches for our first project, and by the end of week 2 i had the distinct feeling that this river down which we had been leisurely bobbing along was in fact simply preamble to a waterfall. now comes time to fasten quick the helmet.
There are so many pieces and details to juggle it can seem, when stepping back to fit them all into frame, somewhat astounding. the artistic issues - script, cast, setting, storyboard, etc. - were anticipated, of course, as welcome challenges. in any art form, creation of a particular piece - the realization of an idea - is mostly about process; if one doesn’t love that (slow, often difficult & frustrating) process it’s the art that suffers. (likely along with the audience.)
What i couldn’t or simply didn’t anticipate were the logistical issues inherent in a film shoot: location agreements; lengthy on-location set-ups; scheduling; the almost laughably short and rigid window into which we must fit a large number of complex moving pieces. and so on.
Though this is, more or less, how things work on professional shoots - or so i’ve been led to and do believe - it’s in here that your head can start to spin. the trick, i think, is to keep moving forward. and really, that’s not a terribly hard maxim to uphold, because for all the implicit astonishment there’s an equal measure of exhilaration. it’s hard work but it’s fun work, and exciting too. necessarily so. why else, after all, would we be here?
