On hold, for now

After getting one more scene in the can, Glenn and I have put filming Psychasm on hold until November.

A friend of mine, Greg Derochie, and I co-wrote a feature that we are now shooting.

It's called Solitary:

The movie tells the story of Sara Ballard, a woman trapped in her own house by irrational fears. When her husband mysteriously disappears, she must confront these fears before she can find him. With the help of a psychiatrist, she uncovers evidence that leads her to suspect an elaborate conspiracy to drive her insane. In her unwavering search for the truth, she discovers a terrifying reality that she never thought possible.

The Solitary website is: http://solitarymovie.com/.

I'll be posting new stuff in this blog around the end of the year or the beginning of 2009 depending on how long it takes me to recuperate.

First scene in the can

After months of writing and talking about this project, many distractions and the everyday things that got in the way, it felt great to be back on set shooting.

We started setting up the scene about 7 pm on a Friday (after a full day of work). We didn't begin shooting until 12:46 am Saturday.

Needless to say, we don't have a crew.

Once we started shooting though, things moved along pretty quickly. We were able to shoot about 1 page of script in 6 to 7 hours.

More screen shots to follow over the next few weeks.

The Script

Writing a script is a difficult task. I've written 8 feature length spec scripts where budget and logistics are two issues that go largely ignored.

With a script you're going to shoot, these two issues become paramount. So much so, that it borders on paralyzing.

As soon as an idea enters your creative mind, your critical mind is asking questions:

• How am I going to find <impossibly difficult to find location or prop>?
• Who is going to play that character?
• What's it going to cost to buy/rent <ridiculously expensive equipment just because it's for film>?

These questions invade the writing process to the point that it can take longer to write a single scene.

The script for Psychasm suffered from this barrage of questions.

The last 120 page script I wrote took me 14 consecutive days. The 20+ page script for Psychasm took 14 days over 4 months.

The limitations for the script were:

• Locations I could get for free, or own, or could steal without getting caught.
• Actors I know, that are good, dedicated and available.
• Budget of less than $1000

These limitations made me miss writing spec scripts. But as anyone who knows how difficult it is to sell a spec script, most never get made.

The problem is that I don't just want to write scripts, I want them to get made into movies. Movies that I can be proud of. The only way to do that is to aim smaller and make them yourself.

That's what we intended to do with Psycham.