Smurfland and Gomorrah

Just because all the banks are on holiday doesn’t mean that the Charmed offices aren’t open for business as usual.

I say business as usual, but it has been an unusual couple of weeks. Not only have we been splitting our time between zombie responsibilities and the extra-curricular Bollywood Baraat shoot, but people that we need to speak to have been on holiday or incommunicado. And then, just when it was getting back to normal, my cousin’s stag party went and collided face-first into office hours.

That said, taking a moment away from dealing with the minutiae of the project allowed me an opportunity to reflect in a slightly more philosophical way on the nature of low-budget feature production.

Put into terms simple enough for me to understand, classical project planning strives to break an enormo-endeavour down into individual tasks, and then looks for the dependencies between the blocks of work. Complete tasks A and B, and this will allow you to make a decision C and kick off task D. Chuck all the pieces onto a calendar and an über-logic appears. You can see what your critical path is and when to expect everything.

As far as I can tell up to now, filmmaking is like that but with all the dependencies taken out. There are a hundred different tasks that need to be done, but you never have enough clarity and certainty at any point to make a properly informed decision. It becomes a multi-dimensional plate-spinning exercise where you have to calculate the risks and probabilities of every choice you make. Not helping matters is that the everything is in flux, forcing you to continually revisit your assumptions and re-tweak your plans. And then you have to make sure everything comes seamlessly together on a specific day so you can start the actual shoot.

It’s basically like cooking a Christmas roast with hundred different constituents, knowing that you have to serve it up exactly two minutes before the Queen’s speech starts.

With thirteen weeks to go before the start of principal photography, Jake and I have to start nailing down some of the larger unknowns. You fill in a couple of numbers on the Soduku grid and the overall solution becomes easier and more manageable. And we need to start by sniping off the largest unknown of all – the budget.

Everything hangs off the budget. Once this is written in stone, a whole load of decisions go and make themselves. So it has been decreed that Friday is our drop-dead day. At close of play we will add up whatever cash we have secured, and we will plan to go and make that film.

Four days to chase down a bunch of open financing leads. Such is the glamorous life of a filmmaker.

But enough with the boring film chat. I saw something on my cousin’s stag party in the centre of war-torn Bournemouth that served as a salient reminder of the importance of picking the right kind of friends. A groom-to-be had been handcuffed to a little person, who was painted blue and dressed as a Smurf. I ran into them when it was still light outside and they had clearly already fallen out - how the rest of the evening went I can only imagine. Someone had failed to do their due diligence in selecting a best man, and it made me wonder how differently this movie-making enterprise would be going if I'd got into it with anyone other than Jake. Love ya, bud. Now can I please have the key? Spinning.