My thesis is well underway by this point, and though I had hoped to post more as the project moved forward it has been hard to find the time. It’s been a gruelling three months since beginning production, but the challenges have been immensely rewarding and I couldn’t be more excited to be working on this project. The script is written, the dates are set, and all that is left now is to actually shoot it. I’ve been designing a workflow all throughout the planning process and I think it’s something that people can really get behind. I’ve been really lucky to have such talented friends to help me with the mountain of work, and it feels more to me like we’re organizing a group of collaborating artists than a film crew. Part of that, I think, is a result of the working environment we find ourselves in. Art school took a while to really make sense to me, and at first I didn’t feel like I was getting much out of it, but when everything fell into place and the community solidified I understood what makes OCAD such a special place.

That was just over a year ago, and since then the quality of work all around has been astonishing. I am humbled by the people working with me, and proud to call them my partners in this experiment. I really believe in the way we’re working, and I think the work will reflect this. It has been difficult preparing to make the film without much of a budget, but a philosophy of adaptation has let us work as a group towards our goal without getting tripped up by the inevitable problems inherent in this kind of project. That adaptation is about keeping the momentum of the project going while also about letting changes happen so that the work can grow into whatever it will become.  Forcing the film to end up exactly how it was originally envisioned didn’t seem like the best way to realize the work, a big part of planning it was making room for necessary changes.

This project began while I was in Paris looking at prospective schools, I had just been to a meeting at one of my dream schools and was invited to sit in on a master class the following morning. I had planned to take the train to a small town north of Paris to look at another campus the following day, but decided the offer was too exciting to pass up. I spent the rest of my day on the patio of a café with a my notebook and a copy of Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection. Over the afternoon I did lots of writing, and all my thoughts started to coalesce into a kind of poetic expression of everything that was going through my head at the time. Brilliant science fiction, anxiety about my future, and an ardent need to be making things again. My pen was furiously scribbling page after page until I had a kind of outline for what would eventually become my thesis work. On the plane ride home I read through what I had written and it really took root, I started extrapolating from that source writing and it just went on from there.  As we flew into the sunrise I snapped the image above.

Fast forward to right now, I’ve just finished my end of term presentation for the first half of my thesis. We did a reading of the script in front of the class and took feedback for what would become the final revision to the script. Storyboards are being drawn, actors are being cast, equipment is being allocated. In less than two weeks we will begin shooting, and roughly four months from now all of us will get together for the first screening. I’m beaming just thinking about it.

More on this project as it develops.