Week 3: A Whole Bunch of Stuff

     If the title is any indication, there have been a lot of developments since my last post.  To try and make clear how much has happened, Sil has a blog post scheduled to be published every single day until Monday.  I, on the other hand, have elected to talk about everything in this one blog post so that I have some wiggle room to talk about any more things this week in future posts.
     First things first, we now know what our film is about (insert applause track).  It's a retrofuturist piece critiquing modern dating culture, and so far our working title is Flame.  Sil intended for it to be a parody of Tinder, but I realized that the term "old flame" refers to someone you used to have a relationship with and was used a lot more back in the day than it is now, so it actually fits really well into our 1950's-esque sci-fi setting.  Obviously a very intentional choice on Sil's part.
     We decided upon having a female main lead and already have an actress for the role: our friend Veronica.  We still need to find another supporting actor or two and maybe some extras, but getting an actress for our main role in Week 3 puts us ahead of schedule considering we didn't plan on finding actors until Week 4.
     Sil has also found a potential shooting location, that being Lucille's American Cafe.  I've never been to the place, but Google describes it as a "1940s-style diner", so it seems to be just what we're looking for.  They've said they're happy to help us by letting us film there, but they still want some more information before hand.  We don't have everything we need yet to nail down a definitive date for filming, but once we do it seems like we'll have a pretty nice shooting location to use.
     In the meantime, I have the task of finding some more actors and props.  I've know a pretty wide variety of people and have found a few folks who wouldn't mind showing up for a moment or two in our opening.  When it comes to props, I'm looking for some small stuff that we could probably put on a table without looking too out of place, like a clock or a little table ornament, something like that.  The things I want have that sort of atom-punk look of a lot of the metal and plastic products from the 40's and 50's.  I've asked some friends if they have anything that fits my criteria, but I haven't come up with anything yet.  I plan on asking some of the older people I know if they have anything like that since, well, they were around when people bought stuff like that regularly.  If I can't find anything to borrow, I plan on seeing if there are any places around here where I can find antique stuff like that without emptying out my entire savings account.
     Yesterday, I made a script outline for Sil to work with in order to make a full script for our scene.  What is a script outline, you may ask.  It's just a skeletal overview of the parts of the scene and the gist of what the characters are saying.  Why not just start the actual script yourself, you may also ask.  That's a very good question.  You see, back when I worked with Sil on a film pitch project back in November (if I remember correctly), we had to make a script for a 3-minute scene.  I wrote up a substantial part of this script, and once I was done, Sil realized there was a bit of an issue.  All of the characters in the scene sounded like me.  What I mean by that is when I write character dialogue, I tend to write them in the way that I talk.  This is a bit of a problem when the characters are supposed to be different people who talk differently from each other.  So when Sil said that she wanted to write the script and have me do any necessary edits or additions, I figured that would be best for getting through this part of the project efficiently.
     That's pretty much all of the big stuff that's happened in the last couple days.  I know right now Sil has been looking for fonts to make the dating app that will appear in our film.  On my end, I'm going to be looking for some songs that we could use so we can get the rights to use it soon.  We also plan on starting our storyboard in the next day or two, so I would say that our planning and early production process is going along pretty smoothly. 
     I'll talk about any updates or big changes that happen in the coming days in my next post.  See you then.