Well, things are still progressing with this whole Myst idea. Patrick and I have spent a lot of time working out the logistics of the whole thing. We’ve worked up a preliminary budget and it looks like we can get away with doing this for about ten grand if we’re smart about it. It’s a lot of money, but hopefully it will be worth it. It’s not very likely that Cyan will give us the go-ahead, but we’re looking at this as a win-win kind of thing. If Cyan says yes – Great! If they say no, at least we have a stellar reel piece to use as a calling card for our careers. In this business it’s so much about what you can put in front of people.
We decided the other day that there is no way we’re going to shoot on anything less than HD (likely the F900). There is going to be a lot of composite work involved and we need the resolution. We’re also very adamant about making this as “studio-quality” as possible. We want the control of depth of field and the kind of dynamics that cinema lenses can give us. So now we just have to figure out how to pull off renting the camera…or more accurately, we need to figure out where we’re going to find ten grand.
This money thing has always been an issue for us. It’s frustrating to do research on other filmmakers, looking for the ways in which they’ve found their funding, and to discover that in almost every instance, they were backed by their families. In the few cases that were not, they did something insanely stupid like maxing out credit cards. Our conclusion has been that, if you want to get started in the film industry, you better be from a rich family. Neither of us are, and we have just about nothing to our names. There is some “extra” money floating around between our two families, but they aren’t very inclined to offer any of it up to us. They have trouble seeing a film career as a legitimate pursuit, I think.
Patrick has a friend, Sarah Lee, that may be a source of funding, but he’s not really sure how to approach her. They used to be really close, but he hasn’t seen her in years. She’s now married to a multi-millionaire and has money to blow. He’s pretty sure he could talk her into fronting us the money as an investment, but he’s also pretty sure that this would result in her wanting to be an active part of the project. She’s really strong-headed and that would definitely become a nuisance. Pair with that the fact that she really dislikes me and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. We don’t have many other options at this point, so I’ll keep pressing him to talk to her. I wish there were another way…
We were talking about where we could shoot this water stuff. It makes the most sense to try to locate an indoor pool somewhere. This would provide us with the control over sound (except for the echo…) that we need. It would also allow us to shoot through the day instead of having to wait for nightfall. Patrick was telling me today that he’s relatively sure that one of the high schools in the area that has just been closed had a fairly large indoor pool that is just sitting empty right now. We’re going to have to look into that and see if there is any way in hell they’d let us rent it out. That would be ideal. We could just build some greeenscreen backdrops and go to town.
We have big dreams of motion-control too, but I’m sure those will be scrapped shortly. A motion-control rig is way out of budget. It would be nice to have some dynamic camera moves, but with all of the background replacement we’ll be doing, it’s a nightmare without motion-control. There are ways, but it’s a bit out of reach for us technically.
Speaking of effects, we’re going to start casting out the net for visual effects people. We need matte painters. The idea is that we’ll hit up the forums for such people and attempt to recruit students or people just starting out. Hopefully credit, copy, and the potential of future employment will be enough to entice them. It’s going to be tricky to get people too excited without being able to tell them what we’re actually doing. Non-disclosure agreements will have to be signed before we can tell them everything.
We have a very long way to go. Hopefully we’ll manage to stay optimistic about this and not give up. We have a tendency to come up with ideas that are fairly out of reach for us logistically and then give up when we realize we have no way of pulling it off. We can’t seem to get excited by something that requires a dumbing-down of our vision either. We need to just commit to sticking with this and finding a way. I’m tired of pouring energy into things just to see them fizzle out.
