The FilmBaking Experience

This is my first post on the new FilmBaking Blog. I can't promise how useful this will be or even how much I'll be able to post, but I'll do my best. I've been reading a bunch of books, which I'll list here at some point but there are things... many things that come up along a filmmaker's journey that are not listed in the books and even if they are, well, sometimes they just don't apply to me. I'm sure others out there have similar blogs. Truth be told, I haven't searched for them yet, though maybe I will after this. More than anything this is a journal, for me, of my trials and tribulations of making my first feature film.

So what's my story?

I guess I think of myself mostly as a writer. I've been writing since I was like two years old... okay maybe not quite that young but I have a journal floating around out there in the ether - a pink and white Hello Kitty journal where I first began my forray as a writer... keeping tabs on all the crushes and cruelties of my fellow classmates. I was, maybe 7 or 8. I wrote poems about bubble gum and jellybeans. I was not the greatest writer but I liked it enough to keep trying. I didn't go to the right school probably to make the kinds of contacts I needed to get a head start in the world, and I didn't make enough of an effort to get published early on. I was insecure, intimidated and mostly, my words, my stories stayed safe inside my desk. But eventually I got over that and started sharing, started growing more confident, kept writing - now screenplays instead of novels, kept reading, began submitting my work to agents and competitions. Still, nothing really came of it. Finally I said, screw this, and decided I'd produce my own script. So I did. Thus was born The Theory of Everything, a 30-minute short, neo-noir film about the unrraveling of a relationship and a bit of a murder mystery. Here's the link, if you want to check it out:

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/drama/watch/v12038561cccfyT2n

I've done a few other things - commercials, documentaries but my heart lies in fiction. I came back to a short story turned script I wrote several years before, Ekstasis. At first I thought maybe I could do a play... that wouldn't be terribly expensive. So I started looking for actors and I found my Ekstasis in the actor/artist/beautiful spirit, Ukwanni Warumbe - a man who speaks five languages, has traveled the globe, is a mystic and a sage and not terribly far off from the 3,600 year old Alchemist. Then somehow along the way we all committed to making it into a movie... myself and the other three, amazing, producers. 

So here we are... I might skip around, but I'll try mostly to keep you posted on what I'm working on at the moment... let's just see how this goes...