Life, Death and Rebirth: The OOMPF application and beyond

With all the essential crew now assembled, I began attacking the OOMPF application with gusto. Following an illuminating discussion with David Smith, the producer on last year's "Legacy", I determined that the application process would favour an overthought approach to the material rather than an underthought one. So, I set about obsessively assembling vast amounts of information about how the film would be produced, putting my unfortunate crew through some pretty early paces. We essentially had a period of pre-application production. This was mostly due to the fact that I knew that my idea was a fairly psycho-analytical/avant-garde one and that my visuals and set strategy would need a lot of thinking through to convince the board that I knew what I was doing.

My application, when it was finally completed after a period of about two months ended up clocking in at 137 pages and consisted of:

1) A one line summation of the plot.

2) A one page summary

3) The script

4) A full budget

5) The shooting schedule

4) The producer's statement

5) The director's statement

6) The marketing statement of intent

7) Crew CVs

8) The director of photography's statement

9) The production designer's statement

10) The editor's statement

11) Lighting plans

13) A shot list

14) A conceptual storyboard

15) Concept art of the set

16) A location summary

17) A detailed breakdown of how we were going to construct Nick's final project

18) Pre-Shot footage

19) Character biographies

20) Showreels from the director, editor and musician

Like I said, obsessive assembly of info.

So, in September we handed in our application and played the waiting game. This game proved to be tortuously protracted as we basically had the film on hold until we got word. All our plans were tied up one way or the other with the response from FTI.

Finally, in November, we got a response. There's no suspense here, the answer was "no". This of course was a bit of a blow, but I found myself surprisingly not too upset about it. We'd done so much work on the film already, it was basically unthinkable for me that we'd wrap everything up and kill the project. Sure enough, Nikit and I had a meeting and agreed that we'd see to it that the film would be produced, even without the extra cash from FTI. Fortunately over those past few months I'd been picking up some lucrative contract work with my production company and had enough money coming my way to make a self-funded movie a very real possibility.

So, we kicked the project into high gear. We set about locking down our shooting times (we had to push it back slightly to the middle of January, but honestly this ended up being more of a help than a hindrance) and ensuring all the crew was confirmed. Unfortunately, our very talented sound designer Damien Watt found it impossible to get out of full time work and guarantee his attendance, so we had to replace him, fortunately coming across Miss. Xoe Baird. Again, this was thanks to Adrian McFarlane and Sam Winzar. This guy will be getting a hefty credit I assure you.

With the crew sourced and schedules locked down, we set about arranging our first full crew meetings, which went exceedingly well. Everyone got along and we covered a lot of crucial info.

Due to our excessive work on the OOMPF application, we were at a real advantage for pre-production. A lot of the stuff which would usually have hamstrung us had already been figured out and it did not take long to get around what few problems remained. Our editor, Donovan de Souza, began the laborious job of assembling the footage for Nick's final project (he's almost done), we re-did the shotlist, hammered out a corrected schedule, got catering organised (essential to any good shoot), began buying props, got our contracts written up by a very talented law graduate (thanks Jehna) and recce'd the shooting location (my parent's basement -thanks guys). We then scheduled our test shoots and, well you know how they went!

So yeah, you're basically up to speed now! We're currently one day away from shooting. Monique and her team are coming around on Wednesday to bump in the rest of the set, the assistant director and producer are doing last minute checks of the location, the pre-shot footage (more on this tomorrow) is being handed over and we're basically all systems go!