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Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. (etc) January 22, 2009

Posted by joost in : film, london , comments closed

What to do when there is no work, no phone calls, no film projects in pre-production, and nothing much going on outside of that? Apart from doing the obvious – letting people know that I am available and sending out C.V.’s – my answer is: making sure that I keep myself occupied with film related activities, making the most out of the time that I now have available.

Starting last week, me and my former classmate Mete have started doing directing exercises on a daily basis. We come up with a simple action or block an existing scene, grab a camera, and experiment with ways to cover this. We have shot a scene from Dostoevsky’s Crime and punishment for instance, focusing on how to stage the action and how to film this in the most efficient way (one setup to cover the whole action) and/or in the most dramatic fashion.
It’s like going to the gym, but then for directors ;-) We are flexing our film muscles every day not only to keep us busy, but with the goal of eventually making it our second nature.

Apart from that I have started penning down ideas and a rough outline for what should eventually become my first feature length screenplay. It is still in a pre-embryonic state, but I’ve found a new angle on a theme that I had been toying with a couple of months ago (but back then I wasn’t too happy with the outcome).

It’s a story about freedom of choice, about how the lives of a couple of characters develop over time and how they act (or fail to act) given particular circumstances. I can’t really tell much more right now because I am still trying to figure out myself what the story is about!

My goal is to have this outline done in two or three weeks. The whole screenplay will take many many weeks if not months to write. This partly depends on finding (or: forcing) my writers mojo, but mostly it will depend on discipline and putting in the hours. To this end I am sticking to a fixed daily rhythm of getting up at 830 in the morning, starting to write at 10am, directing in the afternoon, doing research and some more (re)writing in the evening, and going to bed at 01:30. Which for me is somewhat revolutionary ;-) given my nocturnal habits. Of course I’m struggling a bit to adjust to this rhythm, but this week’s already been better than last week, so I hope to have nailed it by next week.

Haveseenlist 2009 January 1, 2009

Posted by joost in : film, screening , comments closed

This post will be updated throughout the year with all the films that I have seen (hence the name). This is the unabridged version.
See the post Best films in 2009 for a summary.

Last updated: Tue Dec 29th, 2009