Sunday, November 29, 2015
Dear “Catalyst” Diary… Vol. 9
Happy Thanksgiving Weekend, Everyone!
We had our first production meeting. Effects Supervisor Lucien Harriot hosted us at his Mechanism Digital facility and Producer Richard D’Angelo helped lead the meeting. One topic of discussion: to keep our talented Director of Photography, Andrew Pulaski, we would have to move our date from December to January so he could shoot a feature film with Chevy Chase. (Okay, the bright side is we will be past the holidays.)
I met new members of the team, Production Designer Kory Diskin, Production Coordintor Jolene Mendes, 2nd Assistant Director Francesca Morello, and Assistant Director Attapol “EQ” Worrawuttaweekul who will work with me to create new storyboards.
New story boards will be important as one of the meeting outcomes was to challenge me to rework the script and make it even more scary. (After all, we have one shot; make it great or not at all.) As a result of the changes, we will need an extra location and a few more special effects. So we are not simply waiting for January since we have a lot to figure out. But the specific shoot dates in January will also depend on our casting choices and the availability of the actors, who are already busy with film, TV and stage offers.
Casting Director Donna McKenna sifted through over two thousand submissions for our two lead characters and filtered it down to 15 men and 15 women for me to meet. The audition was a grueling eight hours, after which I spent a day of technical work to get the audition video online, then a full weekend of watching those auditions again and again. I was able to narrow the field to four men and four women who will return for callbacks on 12/5/15 so we can see which pairs have natural chemistry. Regardless, I love them all and would brag who they are, but need to act mature until decisions have been made and deals struck.
Below is the team who assisted with the initial auditions.
Jill DeMonstoy, Alex Russell, Jolene Mendes, Donna McKenna, Alan Fine, Francesca Morello
We haven’t mentioned “The Catalyst” Twitter following for a while, but with the help of our ghost story archive, it has grown to over 3600.
Please consider donating a ghost story to bit.ly/TCghost as it helps drive our Twitter following and will possibly influence investors to fund our feature film. (We are now accepting written stories and not just videos.) Underneath your ghost story, we would be pleased to cross-promote anything (within reason), the message reaching not only our Twitter followers, but we have calculated retweets and favorites from just our top 20 Twitter influencers could potentially be seen by over a million people!
Feel free to email any questions to the address below and I will include the answers in the next update. Please keep the dialog going and growing by inviting others to sign up for these email newsletter updates at bit.ly/TCmailing.
I still can’t thank everyone enough, but I’ll keep trying.
Thank you everyone!
If you would like to be emailed these Catalyst Filmmaker Blogs rather than remember to visit our site, please click here…
Alan Fine
alan@catalystghoststories.com
catalystghoststories.com
@Catalyst_movie
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