PRE-PRODUCTION DAY 1

Monday was the first day of pre-production for This Time.  As the director of this independent project I have a lot to do with exactly one month to do it in.  I still need to find a good DP, lock down my locations and start my script analysis, among a myriad of other things.  I'm new out here in Atlanta by myself with nothing else to focus on but this project. Talk about being focused.

One of the first things I wanted to do was to get started on my script analysis but in order to do that I had to change the script some.  All of the male characters in the bar seemed to all speak with the same voice and I needed to change that, badly.  Now I have Malcolm as the more outspoken asshole character, Nick is more caring and reserved and Dre is the funny class clown type character. I also decided to eliminate the first park scene as it was redundant and very little information was conveyed. I finished the rewrite, which took several hours because the internet is such a huge distraction, and sent it out to Reagan and my producers to see what they thought.  Everybody seemed cool with the changes and felt like it sped the pace of the project up more so that is a win.

I am in a new city with damn near zero contacts so I am depending on the people that I know or have gotten to know via social networking to really hold me down here.  We have a huge wedding scene to shoot and I have never been married let alone attended an wedding before in my life.  This means that I am going to have to do a ton of research so I can become more familiar with the process. Also me and Reagan decided to go with a mint green color scheme for the wedding and I like the possibilities. Today I had to have everyone who we already casted send me their measurements so I could send them to the cloth designer so she sketch up some samples.  We don't have a huge budget so I am hoping to go with someone who is looking for exposure for their designing skills. I bought like 10 wedding magazines today to get a feel for different looks and colors.

I seen a couple bars/lounges too and I can't say that I feel in love with any of them.  In all honesty I want to put the money that we have on the screen and I am not really trying to pay for the locations.  I have had too many club owners hit me and say that we can shoot at their spot for it to be otherwise.  Gonna check out Ludacris's Restaurant Straits out later on tonight. Hopefully it'll be a good look.  Maybe we could get Conjure Cognac to do some product placement as well.

All in all today was a pretty productive first day.  I didn't get as far into analyzing the script like how I would have liked to but we are 30 days away so I can make up for lost time tomorrow.  It is important that I learn these characters and know them better than the actors themselves.  They are going to come to me with many questions and I can't afford to not have the answer.  There is nothing worse than a director who doesn't know what is going on.  There will be no doubt with project, trust. I also have to start going through these headshots and figuring out where we are going to hold this casting call on January 9th and 10th. We'll get there.

Director: Cherry

"This time I want it all"