Matthew 13 Blog

Well hello there gentle reader!  It is good to see you again here on the road to honest to goodness, real live, filmmakerville.  I'm not going to lie to you, at times it is a very lonely road, so I am quite grateful for the company.  When last we met, round the ol' proverbial campfire, I spun the yarn of how I went about casting my "no budget" film.  So after getting all the casting pieces into place, it was time to get to work and start making words printed on pieces of paper into a motion picture.  The motion picture that the world will come to know as "Wireless". It seems to me, in my somewhat limited experience, that there are three main phases to getting a film made, (after the screenplay has been written).  Phase One - Pre-Production.  As near as I can tell, this is when a lot of the decisions about the film are made.  Locations are scouted and selected.  Costumes are made or purchased.  Crew is hired.  A schedule is made. ...

So, the first major milestone in my journey had been reached.  If I wanted to be a real live, honest to goodness, filmmaker, I needed a real live, honest to goodness, screenplay.  Mission accomplished.  It may have been a little shorter than I had originally dreamed of, but at least I had some words typed out on sheets of paper.  Now, to reach the next milestone in my journey, I was going to have to find some real live, honest to goodness, actors. The casting process is one that I fear I have continually underestimated.  In truth, I think I underestimate every aspect of the film making process, each and every time I film something, (yet somehow I'm always surprised).  It's not that I am unaware of the importance of the actors.  I know it is they, rather than I, who will be bringing the characters to life.  It is they, the audience will bond with, and it is they, who will bear the brunt of the storm if the audience decides they hate my work. ...

When last we met, gentle reader, I was regaling you with the tale of completing my first screenplay, in the hopes of having a film to submit to the “Big Break” film contest.  As I mentioned last time, I had given myself two weeks to complete the screenplay (which I had already started months earlier), in order to stay on target and complete the film.   Now having completed a first draft a few days ahead of schedule, I was faced with one of those, all too familiar, good news, bad news situations. The good news: I had actually sat down and completed something that a few months earlier seemed a near impossibility, shrouded in mystery.  The bad news: I wasn’t sure that the screenplay I had finished was going to count. As I have stated before, (but I will restate it again to refresh your memory, gentle reader), every screenwriting book that I have read talks about screenplay length as being one hundred and twenty pages.  The reason for this being, most movies are two ho...