Thursday, August 26, 2010

In The Beginning...

My journey to Dark of Moon started a year ago...almost exactly. It started with a TV show, and an ad on Criag's List.

Well, I guess it started earlier...if I wanted to, I could go back to when I started writing stories. I won't, though, for two reasons: One, I don't want to go over 30 years of writing mis-adventures (as entertaining as some find failure to be, for the person who lived it it's akin to banging your head against a large blunt object because it feels SO good when you stop!), and two, because those early stories I wrote suck pretty bad. I mean it...they suck worse than Nicholas Sparks on Prozac and ecstasy. So I'll spare you the sordid details and say that I've tried to write fiction for some time, but found that either the stories weren't very good, or else when they were good, that I'd just never get around to finishing them.

Laziness has inspired more than one person towards greatness. Just look at food: sliced bread, sliced/wrapped cheese, pre-cut vegetables...Americans spend billions every year just so they don't have to pick up a knife. Well, my fiction-writing habits were extremely lazy. I have a novel that I've worked on, on and off, for 18 years. What stops me from writing it isn't the story, the characters, the dialogue, etc. THOSE I have set. It's just...everything else. Or, more specifically, prose descriptive passages. You know, those bits of a novel where the writer paints the scene for the reader? “Eliza entered the room and looked around. Dust laid over every surface like the embrace of an old lover whose affections had long passed passionate and ventured on trite and pedantic. The smell of must hovered everywhere, assaulting her senses with long decayed promises of beauty squandered. She took a step, and the floorboards creaked in protest at this unwanted intrusion.....” THOSE always tripped me up. It's not that I'm bad at them (above example not-withstanding), I just don't like writing them. Characters, story-line, dialogue? Love it...I can write that stuff and enjoy every minute. But every time I'd sit down to work on my novel, those damned prose passages would quickly send me to check my e-mail. Every 30 seconds. Or balance the checkbook. Or offer to take the neighbor's dog for a walk.

With this as the backdrop, we fast-forward to August 2009, and my wife is looking for writing jobs on Craig's List for me. She happened across an ad from an independent producer who was trying to launch an indie TV show, a comedy set in a comic book store (which will henceforth be referred to as “The Extended Casting Call For Dark of Moon” for reasons that will become appearant later). It said that there would be a fair amount of “geek humour” (well, it said “geek humor”, but if I write it, it shall be spelled as “humour”), which made my wife believe that I'd be a natural fit for the show. I don't know why she thought that I'd be into geek humour, but I went ahead and stopped editing my list of Star Wars-inspired knock-knock jokes and sent the producer an e-mail. Several e-mails and one in-person meeting later, and I have the job of writing the pilot for the series.

Whoever said that half of success is showing up wasn't kidding...over the next few months I would go from never having written a script before in my life to being the main writer on the show by sheer value of doing what I said I'd do in the time I said I'd do it. For example, the producer of “The Extended Casting Call For Dark of Moon” had been trying to get the show going for a year before our meeting, but he wasn't a writer and needed writers to make the show happen. He had been going through traditional channels in the Northeast Ohio film scene to find writers, and while he found enthusiasm, he saw no actual scripts being written. I vowed to be different. Six days after our first meeting, I handed him a complete pilot episode. While I wound up re-doing a scene here and there, that script I handed him wound up being 90% of what we shot. I created backstory for characters, plotted a story-arc for the season, and wound up writing 3 complete episodes, and half of three more.

I took to script writing like Sarah Palin takes to a RNC expense account. I wrote with increasing speed, increasing quality, and loved every second. In fact, once I ran out of episodes to write (we were only doing a 7 episode mini-season...well, we PLANNED on doing a 7-episode mini-season, but we wound up with one episode, and it took five months, and....oh, bugger it! I'll just write an entire blog post about what I learned from “The Extended Casting Call For Dark of Moon”), I didn't want to stop writing. So I started writing movie scripts. And the rest, if not history, is another blog post....

Kind Of Quiet Lately...

Looking at the blog, I realized that I've been slacking off on doing the whole “update” thing. Of course, I've been phenomenally busy as of late. Here's a sample of what I've been doing lately:

* Working on a shooting schedule
* Making up individual schedules for each actor
* Adjusting accordingly
* Planning our 366 separate shots to achieve the film
* Arranging those 366 shots into both a scene-by-scene list, and a location-by-location listing
* Rehearsing 5 days a week with my cast
* Doing astrological charts for cast and crew
* Doing Tarot readings for cast
* Acting as a sounding board for various problems, crises, and whatnot

...all of that in addition to being a father of two, a husband for one, and finding a replacement for my parts in Cleveland's Pagan Pride Day (note to self: while in pre-production for a film, never NEVER volunteer for jack shit outside of it!).

But enough excuses...this is meant to be a news source for the making of the film, as well as my experience making it, so I will now start work on a blog on...something. I'm not sure what yet, but I've just loaded 143 hair metal songs from the 80's onto my computer, built a playlist, and I'm ready to rock!

Stay tuned....

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Scheduled Insanity...

Well, we now have a rehearsal schedule. And I'm working on the shooting schedule. I'm still hammering out the details, but we may have principle photography done earlier than I thought.

My cast is kicking ass! Every rehearsal is less like work and more like a joy...these people are nailing every scene in quick succession. We read, I direct, they read again, and nail it! These people are going to make me look good...

(And you...yeah, YOU! Go and "fan" our cast on Facebook. You can find their pages here. They deserve it...)

This is becoming epic...

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Thoughts on Our First Read-Through

Well, we finally read the whole script, in character, all the way through. What a bloody rush!

I tell you, after living with this script for the better part of a year, it was SO GROOVY to hear it read aloud. Jokes that stopped being funny to me months ago got laughs. Some so big we had trouble continuing (and this was from people who had read the script before, too). Remember people...I wrote this screenplay back in JANUARY. I've revised it 10,000 times. Everybody there made things come alive for me again, and I remembered the buzz I felt after I finished the first draft.

To my cast, thank you all SO much! You guys rock.

To my crew...few of you had anything to read, yet turned out in force. We need to be a team, and you guys showed mucho team spirit. You rock no less.

Now we begin the rehearsal process. I'm getting excited! Of course, now we get to beat this script into the bloody ground again, but no matter. My cast is gelling much faster than I expected (gellin like that famous explorer, what was his name?...oh, yes, Ponce DeLeon!), and we're already farther along that I thought we'd be at this stage.

Now I get to pick nits and piss people off. Weeee!!!

To all my fellow Mooners (a name dreamed up by our Beth, Kelly Rogers...which may sound odd, but it's WAY better than "Twi-hard"!), all I can say is thanks for everything, and full steam ahead!

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Website Updates!

Hi everyone...

Well, I've been working away at the Dark of Moon website, and there's more and more there now. There are more bios, behind the scenes photos, even music videos!

So check it out....

http://www.DarkOfMoon.com