*6 weeks and counting

In a follow up to my last post I don't think I would be so frustrated and aghast if I didn't have to do everything myself. Maybe I just like being in control or whatever it may be. But I feel like switching between casting and then set dressing and then making a shot list, etc. so quickly isn't helping me find myself at all. It's taking me further away psychologically. I feel like I have to make the money, find the people, find the places, make it look good and then move on to doing lighting/camera tests all within the same day. It's absurd. I don't think I know what I want anymore. I think I hit the point where this just needs to get done regardless of if I'm staying true to what I want. At this point, I feel so mentally battered that any department can do whatever they want and I don't care if it looks good or not. I don't even care if I have that department. I'm lost. Not in myself, like I thought I was a week ago. But I'm lost creatively and I need to find where I stopped moving forward and just sat there in the fetal position, before I can even begin to worry about staying true to myself and my vision. How can I stay true to a vision if I've lost myself 6 steps ago? Here's hoping I can find whatever's left of myself before it's too late.

T-2 weeks until shooting.

Wish me luck.

6.5 weeks and counting.

11 weeks is not enough time for someone to find themselves as a director. There is no time to breathe in the material. There is no time to let the casting options soak into you and the script. There's no time to find that perfect location. Nor is there time to have that perfect edit. And don't even think about sound design.

I've heard this a lot from friends who have been through what I am going through now and it never made enough sense to me until now. I feel what they've gone through. The only way I can describe it, in to more human terms, is it's a lot like going wine tasting, well the theory of it, you see I've never been, but regardless of that you get just a small taste on your tongue and then you have to spit it out and try a different one. How is that in anyway enjoyable? How is doing everything you can for your film just to the point where your ok with it and then moving on to the next thing make sense? I want my film to breathe, and I want it to take as long as it needs to. But I can't. It's like a good wine, open it too soon and drink it too fast it'll still be good but if you had just given it that little extra time in the bottle and if you had just let it breathe the right way when it came out of the bottle it wouldn't be so easily forgotten and it wouldn't be just a bottle of wine. It would be the best red wine you've ever had. And. You would go back for more.

Week 1: The Script, The Story, The Characters

 Through The Revisions

Dying For Duncan is a script I've been working on for about a year and a half now. The evolution and development of the story itself has been a beautiful and wonderful experience that I hope every filmmaker experiences.

It started out as an idea of telling a story through the eyes of a stalker. The original setting was a high school student who had a crush on this innocent and beautiful being who he had never met nor talked to in his life. And now that it's nearing production, Dying For Duncan is a psychological thriller about quiet art teacher Duncan Colemort who gets tempted and seduced into stalking his beautiful and naive student Camille Diamond by his alter ego whose embodiment is a sexy imaginary version of Camille.

 Duncan

Duncan, through the revisions, has always been an introvert and a very strange person who only confided within himself. He would have daydreams of what he wanted to be with Camille, his innocent obsession. And it would through him out of reality and he wouldn't realize that it was his imagination that was taking over and he was actually stalking and killing her. Through the development of his character I had decided that I wanted him to have multiple personality disorder. I didn't want him to realize that he had a superior conscious that would take over and show him what he wanted to see so that his actions wouldn't be so wrong. And that's how Duncan's second personality, Hyde, was born.

Hyde

I had developed the characters loosely based upon the idea of Sigmund Freud's structural mode of the psyche, the ego, super-ego, and Id.

According to Wikipedia, Id, Ego, and Super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural mode of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop you from doing certain things that your id may want you to do.

Duncan's character was based on the Ego, the middle man between the personalities. Hyde is the id that takes over Duncan's conscious mind and lets Duncan do whatever his heart desires. Camille is based on the super-ego, only in the sense that she is less obvious than Hyde is and tempts Duncan into doing wrong in the most seductive way she can.

Camille

Camille is innocent. The real life Camille that exists within the real world has no idea that Duncan has a personality based on her, nor does she know about this obsession that Duncan has with her. The whole theme for my story is ruining the innocence and Camille plays a big role in being the innocent

Camille as a part of Duncan's psyche is less innocent and more of a temptress. She is what Duncan needs for Hyde to take over. Duncan is this vulnerable, childlike personality and he doesn't know himself and that's what allows him to become vulnerable to Hyde and Camille taking over.