LEGAL

The first step in any production is to bring on legal. We have hired a wonderful production lawyer whose experience spans feature films, TV and digital, and she is getting up to speed on our progress so far and what we need to accomplish to gain financing and begin production.

CASTING

Great news! We have hired casting directors! As a first step, they sent us a “spaghetti list” of available actors (that’s when you throw ideas at a wall to see if they stick), and we’re currently identifying our top choices for the four lead roles from those lists. It’s an exhaustive process that requires us to identify our creative choices and check them against distribution and sales agent’s lists in terms of value in relation to our budget. It’s an exciting process that allows for the discovery of some amazing new talent.

PRODUCTION MEETINGS

Our line producer is working super hard on our budget. Nothing has been finalized, but speaking of an exhaustive process… he has now developed no less than 15 different working budgets. We’re looking at several locations, as well as shooting assumptions (i.e., how many days will we be shooting, for example?), and every time we learn a new piece of information, we update the budget. Our line producer has a lot of smart ideas about how to use our budget most efficiently while still staying true to the director’s vision, and production meetings are lively affairs of a lot of “what if we…” types of questions.

LOCATION

Our location options are narrowing down, and we’re also starting to identify our potential production windows (mid summer-early fall), but all of that is dependent upon finding the perfect location – we need to find a pre-1974 house with a small barn that looks like it’s in Florida. To that end, we’ve hired some location scouts to help identify some options. As soon as we have some workable solutions, we’ll be able to lock down location and budget.