"FALLING UP" a Flyin' Monkey Films production

Tomorrow I gotta meet with Mark Rivard and formally audition him for the lead. I hate auditioning, but it's a necessary process. Normally I don't even audition actors I've worked with, but in this one case it's necessary.

UPDATES on ACT 2
spent the day shopping and the rest of the afternoon finalizing the audio for "ACT II". Redesigned the poster and the DVD cover and prepped for printing. Kinkos actually does a nice job of printing off DVD covers on 8.5"x14" paper and usually I print the DVD faces here, but my printer is busted. Gotta find a new printer now.

Anyway, here's the new poster.
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Working on mixing the audio and finalizing the ADR tracks tonight. Damian did an awesome job on the score and i should have a link ready tonight FINALLY.

Once this is done it will clear my edit schedule up a bit and I can take this project off the boards. Next will be a re-edit of THE TRADE and then UNBECOMING. with any luck and according to schedule, I'll be editing FALLING UP in January/February.

New Podcast will be up in the morning.
 
Title design. That's usually an often overlooked part of a movie and it's a credit that you see and go "oh wait, they hired someone to design the title sequence". I think I've designed the titles for "ACT 2" about 5 times now, trying to find the right feel and I've settled on one that's perfect. I don't know how many designs I'll go through for FALLING UP, but it's one of those things that I'll be looking at designing early on. It adds so much to a movie to have attractive titles, and with enough time and planning, they can be an important part of the flow.

So I'm spending the morning getting the title sequences all set for ACT II. It's the last bit to go before I render out to DVD.

Now it's got me wondering if there is any DVXUsser who specializes in title design. Might be worth checking into.
 
Michael Anthony Horrigan said:
Amazing poster! Nice work.

Mike
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike. The photo was actually shot while we were going through costume choices (2 days before we actually shot). Figured it was better to use an amazing shot that I could direct right there on the spot, than trying to do it later and forget. If you have a digital camera handy and your lead actor (or all of your actors) AND you have an idea... well this is the start of it. I photoshopped out the living room in the background and manipulated the images to get exactly what I wanted.

Got a digital camera and your actor for your new movie? :grin:
 
still trying out the new features. its got some really cool stuff going on that i have to try out, like "search video by speech" where it finds keywords in speech. can't wait to try that one out. so far it's pretty nifty and i think a little more memory intensive than CS3. i still have CS3 installed though..... just in case... I'm paranoid that way.
 
Kicking myself today. Yesterday I threw away the last 5 pages of my "perfect script" when Andrew looks at me (well he gave me a "look" over IM.. its was more text. but you could feel it) and asks me: so where's the loss?

SO we started over again. And I find myself slowly walking down the dark corridors of a place called "Drama". The current argument is to at least write the new storyline dealing with loss, and then go back and tweak it. But while there was much comedy and a certain level of joy and cool stuff in the last draft... this one is going into a dark place... maybe not as dark as THE TRADE and defnitely not as dark as ACT II (someone called that one deadly depressing), but still potentially dark.

FALLING UP is supposed to be a light comedy and I have to keep that in mind, but maybe I should accept my limitations... and the fact that maybe I'm not that good at writing comedy to a theme.

I'll see how this draft goes and if some hilarity can be added to the situation and dialog to make it more joyful, more kinetic... and not devolve into a sobfest.

edit: i have Dr Horrible's Sing-A-Long_Blog on in the background while I write. Maybe it will help my mood.
 
First purchases for the film went on yesterday. Me and Jake took a trip out to Home Deopt and Canadian tire to find materials for the harness and cabling system to pull the actors into the air. We're also consulting with a rock climbing pro about safety gear and some of the best systems we can use.

One of the things we really want to stress with the building of this system is safety. Our actor is going to get up to about 9 feet off the ground, so aside from the main 2 cable pulling him into the air, plus a guide wire, there's a redundant safety cable in case anything goes wrong.

I don't know the name of the rock climbing guy, since Jake is the one who found him, but he's going to be our consultant for this particular effect. We're already working out the details of the hoist, especially for the internal shots, which can possibly be trick shots, and we just leave the main Practical FX shot for the EXT. For Exteriors we're probably looking at either using a Cherry Picker... if any are available in Toronto during the winter. Time for more research.

Dolly MK 2 has also been constructed and it's been inspired by Ben Sliker's shots in "My Name is Harold Allen"... the shot from above. We'll have to do a test and see how well this runs, but to give you an idea of what we're doing, let's just say the camer runs below the track...

Should be a busy weekend. Off to find the safety harness now.
 
No tests on the dolly yet. jake is still looking for the harness so we can get the tests done as well as a few test shots. Those might make it into the podcast since it will be good forward movement.

We've got 2 green screen shots planned for two major scenes that I've had in mind from day one and we'll be doing screen and FX tests on those shots next week.

I'm still celebrating my birthday weekend, so I'm off to get another bottle of Chimay Red and that can kick my ass like the other one did last night. At least this time I've got a bellyful of sushi. Found this All-You-Can-Eat Sushi restaurant ($22 per person) called Wasabi and it was well worth it. I like sushi, and the only thing i like better is LOTS of it.

Off to drink my beer now. Hopefully we can get some shots off tomorrow.
 
I LIKE the new version of the script. It brings the funny, there's drama of course, but not heavy moody dark drama, and there is definite LOSS! I think that has been the hardest thing for me so far: dealing with loss as a definite and not an abstract. If people have to LOOK for i (especially in a film this short) then there are problems. If it's right there in their faces, well then that makes a hell of a lot of difference.

Of course it probably took me about 5 really good beers to make that discovery, but most of it is time and a lot of plot development. I wrote down the first idea I and i continued to write the others, so that gave me a framework that I could actually build on.

Once the note taking began about attributes of the character and what he has lost and especially how we can ilustrate that.... show it AND tell it, the story began to take on a life of it's own and I began to see the true shape of it.

Funny thing is, what I wrote in the first draft is the same story, I had just began writing at the WRONG POINT in the story.

Today I'm proud to say we're going to finally have a locked script for production.
 
Yeah, 6 minutes is hard to write for. You have to decide where you want to start and end in a much larger story. Or compress the hell out of your timeframe.

Is your goal to be a writer as well as a director? I see you put a lot of time into the script and most people (at least around here) just hand it off to different people. You seem to take a more active role in the development, which is cool. :)
 
I like writing way too much to give it up. I was a writer first, then an artist. Movie making came much later for me so I've been a writer much much longer than I've been a director.

It's nice to be able to develop a script so completely. Usually I;ve just written a script, made some edits and then found problems in the shooting of it becasue it hadn't been completely developed. Or worse yet, found problems while viewing the finished thing and KNOWING that were were issues with the story becasue so much time hadn;t been spent on answering all of the questions before hand.

Questions that can be answered in the script we can deal with up front and be prepared fro the actual cost of a production. Set Design is going to be a key element for this movie and knowing the environment and the WHY of the environment is extremely important.

As a result of this development period, I now know every single prop and picture that needs to be placed on set and what visual gags we can introduce. They all form part of the characters and draw us further into their world, so by the time we roll camera, we're just making it real for everyone else....
 
Well the script has gotten the blessing of Mr Stoute and has survived with a couple of edit notes. We pretty much hashed out the rest of the storyline this evening and agreed on a coupe of points. The current running time of this script will probably be around 8-10 minutes according to pacing. During our writing session, we agreed to let it run long, but made note of certain points where we can actually cut it to the six minute mark.

How do we do this? There are parts that have been put in mostly for pacing and a little more character development. while these parts are important to the full story, with them missing, we actually don't see a difference in the story being told. It just feels FULLER with them in. Last word will be spoken during the edit stage. In anycae, the DVXUser Fest version will run 6 minutes.

Better to have too much than too little, right? I'm sure lots of us can argue that point, havign had to trim out masterpieces down to festival length. I know I have. But this time I'm PLANNING for it.

Storyboards start tomorrow. I might be handlign SB duties for the moment, depending om my schedule. Now have to decie if I'll be using my trusty pencils.... or doing a photos-storyboard.
 
Meeting my actors this evening. To play Frank we're still looking at Mark Rivard
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I worked with him on my entry into the ColdPlay "Lost?" video competition, and he was pretty good. Now we're going to see if he has the chops to pull off this role. It's a pretty complex character with a definite story arc but he has to look believable. We'll see today, but he did look the part last time we met adn I wrote this script with him in mind.

I'll be meeting Stephanie Cima (everyone mispronounces her name as "SEE-ma" instead of "CHEE-ma" which is appropriate since she is Italian) a little eariler. I worked with her on a music video shoot that Jake was filming and shile she has a good look, she may be too much of a babe for the role of Rachel. I have to get a headshot of her.

Mark is bringing along his friend Tiffany, who has a lot of theater experience, but not alot of screen time. She does want to do more films, but seems to keep getting cast in theater. We'll see how she does.
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I'll be doing a podcast of the meetings and we'll get a good look at the actors and the personalities that we'll be working with during the course of this production.

Once we get the part of Rachel cast, maybe we can lock down the location and get shooting before the REAL Christmas rush begins...
 
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