justin_guber - @ 20six.co.uk

The Curse of the Guber

Hmmm. Haven't posted in a while. Been a busy, busy beaver. As some of you may know from reading previous posts, I went to London recently and was planning to shoot some footage there and shoot the rest here for my next feature film. Some of you may think that that's what I've been up to.
You'd be wrong.
Truth is, I didn't get all the footage I was hoping to get (although it may be enough for a short film, we'll see). In a way, it almost feels like a curse. I always seem to start on one project that I'm really hyped up about and then stuff happens that makes me completely annoyed with the project and not want to do it anymore.
The Curse Itself...
My first feature was supposed to be a love story called 'Celup', but due to certain... circumstances, I ended up getting frickin' annoyed with the project and ended up resurrecting an older project which later became 'Ciplak'.
Then I was supposed to do a short film for a multi-national company to help promote their product in the process, but that fell through at the eleventh hour as well (it's always at the eleventh hour) and fell into a funk, only to end up doing four episodes of 'Dark City'. Once again, I resurrected two old stories of mine which later became two of the four episodes - 'Eye See Eye Believe' and '4:20pm'.
(Incidentally, the storyline structure of that short film was fleshed out into a made-for-TV film that'll be coming out soon about Sapok Biki, the Malaysian flyweight boxer who won the gold at the commonwealth games when it was held here).
My second feature, the one I was going to shoot half of in England, was supposed to be a love story with the working title of 'Greener', inspired by movies such as 'Before Sunset' and '21 Grams' (a loose connection between the two, I know, but if you read the script you'd see what I mean). But the short time I had there (I didn't think a week would fly by so quickly) and the many things I wanted to do (buy a guitar, hang out with my old friends, go DVD shopping) meant I only got a handful of shots. Maybe 5%.
But something else has formed in my head that I've been writing for the past week. In fact, within a few days I wrote about 50+ pages of the first draft, then decided it wasn't going anywhere, deleted it, thought about it, and spent the last three days re-writing it all tighter than a nun's crack.
Writing's been going well, and I'm on the final act now. I won't say much now, so as not to jinx the curse, but I'll tell you some of the inspirations - Angel Heart, Robert Johnson and elements of Jangan Pandang Belakang.
Oh, and it was a story I originally tried to sell as a possible fifth episode for me to direct for Dark City which wasn't accepted. Thank God.

10.9.07 18:00

Permalink / Comment

Celtx - I like

Celtx - I like this software. It's free, it's great for scriptwriting, and it can help you schedule your shoot, make notes on everything from characters and wardrobe to CGI and animal handling.
The only slack thing about it is you have to be on-line to export your script to PDF, which is fine for you people who are constantly on-line but for us wi-fi guys it sucks a pair of balls.
But only a small pair.

13.9.07 14:34

Permalink / Comment