All right, you’ve heard (figuratively speaking) me going on about this whole Pirates thing. But what the heck is that all about?
Well, the Duke City Shootout is an unusual sort of film festival – making the film is actually a part of the festival itself. Out of hundreds of script entries, the best is picked in each of seven different categories. And here’s the cool part of the festival – the prize for writing a winning script is a movie cast, crew and equipment for one smack-down week of intensive film-making. All the shooting must be completed in three days, then there there are a few more days for editing, then the resulting films are judged and awards are given.
It’s not every day you get enthusiastic help to make your vision real, and in this case it gets even better. Some of the help and many of the judges are people even I have heard of. These are people that it’s worth having see your stuff even if you don’t win. So it’s exciting. As a career event, it’s probably more significant for fuego than for me, as he will get a directing credit on this masterpiece. Still, my resume will now include something called the “Federico Fellini Award”.
Best of all, we’re making a movie. Twelve minutes of cinematic magic from our heads made real with the efforts of a large number of dedicated and hard-working people. In the tradition of this blog I won’t be calling them by their real names unless they ask me to (you know, it’s always good to have a Media Empire as part of your PR machine), but I will be chronicling here the efforts of a crew of people with more dedication than brains as we try to create something we can all use as a calling card.
It looks like no one has ever tried anything quite this ambitious at the shootout. We come in with a couple of advantages – our director really knows how to direct (many of the other winners are more like me, I think), and fuego has connections in the biz, skilled people eager to help us out. Three days of shooting means that everything has to be ironclad ready-to-go when the shotgun sounds. Yes, a shotgun will sound. Our success will already be decided to a large degree before that. The right people, knowing what they need to do and when, and all the tools they need ready to go. Then, no doubt, there will be the times when something isn’t going right and we need to blast through it and just keep shooting.
So now I am sitting in a London hotel, on an overnight layover on my way to Albuquerque, to do anything I can to have us ready at the starting gun. Too bad I don’t know what I’m doing. fuego has given me some location scouting pointers, and I think I can provide a valuable opinion during casting, but other than that I’m probably the guy who drives to the White Sands gift shop. I hope they have snow globes.
