I have been very busy the last few weeks.
One of the things that made me busy was a meeting we had on April 7th. When I say "we" I mean myself and the director, Chris. We met with our co-producer Tricia.
There are three types of producer in the world: The ones who say they are producers but never actually do anything; the ones who put packages together (money, directors, actors) but don't do the nitty-gritty of production; and producers who do the nitty-gritty of organising a production to make it happen.
You see it was a few months ago that I decided that unless I got my act together and started making WINTER happen, it wasn't going to (this is no criticism of Chris, by the way, he has an extremely demanding day job). It had been two years, and while the script had been developing nicely nothing else was happening.
Tricia is a type 2 producer. And at the meeting she mentioned that if we had something we could show - an actual produced scene with all the trimmings - then when she was at the Cannes Film Festival in May she'd be in a position to promote WINTER to major investors. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, she said, but you need something to shoot with.
We had been planning a test shoot on May 6th anyway but this put a whole new light on it. And, to mix metaphors, lit a fire under us.
If there's a way in which Chris and I are similar, we both respond very positively to external deadlines. And this deadline was a killer: create a complete scene 8, with computer graphics, of very good quality and deliver it by 15th May. Seven weeks.
With Chris working an 80 hour week and me changing contracts. I imagine most people would consider it impossible, but it isn't.
As of this moment: we have cast the male actor required (the female was already cast); we have a modern, fully equipped, green screen study booked for 3 days - at no cost. We have crew in place, the composer is ready to go and, fingers crossed, the computer graphics will be produced by a professional company for a fraction of the usual cost. And we're halfway through.
The only issue is money, as certain things must be paid for. To that end we started up a crowd-funding project on IndieGoGo. We are hitting our marks and we will succeed but it would help, seriously, with back-up pennies.
So help out project: http://igg.me/p/93585?a=405734 and choose from our excellent perks.
