Update on upcoming film

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

Please ignore my grammer and spelling as I will try to type this fast in the limited time I have. So here it goes:

For the past few days, I've been working on my first shooting script. I look like I know what I'm doing but I'm just picking it up as we go along.

When the idea was just floating in my head, the film sounded like a simple idea...something that can be completed in a few hours. As the script came along, I quickly discovered that simple idea become 18 page idea. Plus, I then added shooting notes to just a few of the scenes of the script (key word: "few") and we now we're at 56 pages!!! Keep in mind that we have to coordinate 19 charactors in the this film, 14 scenes, and possibly over 200 camera angle shots in 3 hours (can you see the gray hair yet?).

Next time you "fun stuff" in the Director's job description, please read the small print. Its a lot of management, a lot of work, a lot of headache, and in our case a zero (can't-even-afford-the-shoe-in-shoestring) budget and we have to pull it off in just a few hours. The icying on the cake is that there is a fight scene and a basketball scene (both are action scenes) and no camera notes have been written for it. In other words, we have to do all that improv.

I'm totally down for improv but our situation can't allow us to make any mistakes. My biggest concern is that the story will come out chessy and there are holes in the story (because we may forget to film this or that shot). Then again, it is my first real film that I'm doing and I'm just making up the "how to" part as we move along. Alhamdulillah, I got a great group of brothers and sisters to work with. Like I said in previous posts, its a learning process and you can't expect the best results with your first try. Like anything, it takes practice and the only way you can get that practice is by going through the motions of making a film.

For me, the biggest learning curve has been the preparation and the planning phase. I have learned a great deal of how to "organize" things to make sense. As a group, we have been learning the "how we could do it better next time" concept for the storyboard and there will more for the actual filming day. Nevertheless, the more we do this type of thing, we more we learn what works and what doesn't. It will be a great training for a bigger projects InshAllah.