Finding a cast was a wonderful thing. If I wasn't already sure this was going to be an amazing project I certainly knew it now. Within a few weeks after casting I had found almost all the actors. A few came later through video auditions and then we were all set.
Very early on I set some dates. A date for the first day of shooting, readings of the screenplay and most importantly - the completion of the screenplay of course.
The original date for the first day of filming did end up being moved a bit but not much - and only because it was things that were out of anyone's hands. So all in all I was very happy with that.
Now though finding a cast took time, effort, auditions, looking through hours and hours of videos etc it sort of was the easy part. Now I just needed to find EVERYTHING and EVERYONE else!
If you want something done you have to do it yourself! My parents always told me that and it's true. However - doing a project like this presented an interesting challenge for me: How much was I actually going to be able to do myself and how much did I have to put in the hands of others, weather I liked it or not?
Well, things seemed to solve themselves before I even started to worry about them.
While mailing around, 'shopping' for a DP I put an ad on good old Craigslist. Like you do - just for fun in a sense, because you never really expect much from that place and yet I'm sure many of us, looking back on what we have done, are astonished at how many valuable and important things, people and projects have come out of that place.
I was contacted by what ended up being my DP, Nathaniel Kramer. Obviously not just by him, I got a lot of interesting responses to say the least. Once again, some were telling me just how much I was never going to able to do with my project and others had expectations that would have given me a lot of sleepless nights.
As I mentioned earlier, I have been pretty honest, sometimes too honest, about my skills and my experience with filmmaking. I knew I wanted to make this film - and that's pretty much all I knew. Risky business going out there when you don't know any technical terms, have no idea what a RED camera does etc etc.
Anyway, back to my DP - short for Director of Photography in case anyone out there know even less than I did.... I think I did know that one though but that's about the extend of my abbreviation knowledge in the film industry when I ventured into this.
I met with him at his office, I had sent him the script and he seemed to like it a lot. And though I had been thinking about locations and looking around for suitable places to shoot this film, before I knew it we were on Google Earth, going along the train tracks in the Hamptons - an area he knew well - finding out what places close to tracks might be worth contacting to film some, or all of the film.
When I left his office my brain, body and soul was buzzing with ideas, inspiration and visions. It was quite amazing.
After what seemed to be just a few days I walked all over Southampton, looking for places along the tracks and checking out the places we had been looking at on Google.
