Update: Youth Group Film Project

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

We have been confirmed to film this Sunday InshAllah. It will be a short film with a cast of 19 people. The script is about 18 pages long. Usually, it will take weeks to film such a movie, but because of our time limitation, we have hours to film the entire movie. That is no hard..its INSANE!!

In real life, you don't have access to unlimited resources, actors available whenever you want them, locations available whenever you want them, etc...You have crazy deadline and tight budgets. So far, our budget is zero. Its not even a shoe-string budget (shoe strings cost money..haha).

Here is the process of the script so far:

1. It all started off with an idea
2. I put together those ideas in a sequence of events (one page summary of the story)
3. I took pictures of the various locations of the Masjid and attached at least one picture to each scene.
4. Sister Aisha (Mahdi's wife) took that document and wrote a script.
5. I went through it and revised some of the dialogue and added some scenes
6. I went to youth group, found out who was a no-show and who was serious. Learned about their student schedules. Spoke to 2 of their teachers and got their advise on who should play which part.
7. In order to pull off this crazy filming schedule, I wrote a "shooting script", which basically notes shows the specifics of what the camera should film during each and every line of the script (so far I have finished part of it). It explains the action of the characters, where the camera will be, what type of shot it will be shooting, etc...I also drew up a diagram (layout of scene) showing where the people will be sitting, walking to, etc...

The idea is to plan and prepare as much as possible so you can film as much as humanly possible. Once I finish making shooting notes for the entire script, I think I need to prepare for the worst case scenario (running out of time). Thus, I have to mark the scenes that are VITAL vs that ones that can be erased without ruining the story. Ideally, I want to film everything but I know that there is a possibility that it may not happen so I have to have a backup. The goal is to film everything in 3 hours (crazy!!!). There is a possibility that most of the students will be available for another 5 hours (the following Sunday) but you never know with students. They are super motivated one day about being in a film...the next week something else might be funner (yeah i know..."funner" is not a word but hey, this is a blog so its ok)