Thanks for the memories... I think

I had this wonderful idea that, as we were filming Conversion, I was going to be able to record my thoughts day by day, capturing each new and exciting moment within a day or two of shooting. After all, we were only shooting on weekends and a few select week days, right? So, with everything so carefully planned in advance, there was absolutely nothing for me to do during filming except stand in front of the cameras and act, right?

Wow, it's funny how idiotic that logic sounds in retrospect.

I don't know what I was thinking when that idea came into my head, but I certainly wasn't considering the fact that, when we started shooting, we didn't have locations for some shoots, we hadn't accounted for the fact that we'd have to drop one night of the scheduled shoot completely because our lead actor had a conflict and even some of the cast remained to be finalised (in fact, as I was to discover in the coming weeks, even some of the cast that had been finalised wasn't quite "finally finalised"). And that's not even taking into account the number of questions that one can get asked on a film set that one has never before considered, but which nonetheless demand to be answered. Where do you have to take those cables? How the f**k should I know? Except that I'm supposed to know, because I'm one of those people who's supposed to know what they're doing on this set. That's kind of a scary concept.

So I never did get around to writing my filming diary the way that I wanted to, but the good news (depending on your point of view) is that I take pretty good notes and I have a pretty good memory, and no one has yet established a statute of limitations on writing about experience.

In other words, the shooting diary is still a live project. So stay tuned here, because for the next couple of weeks, I'll be rehashing all the highs and lows, lessons learned and problems solved, of filming Conversion... learn from our fails and take strength from our wins. This is how we managed, with no external funding and no industry support, to get a feature film shot.