Lauren wakes up to find that she's been sent a present; a dream catcher. But who is it from? And did she ever wake up?
A year ago I wrote a screenplay. My basic idea for it came from the blue lightbulb hanging in the walk-in wardrobe in my flat. It's not that much, I know, but it gave me a few ideas, and an image to base the story around.
I sat down with a pad of paper and a pen, and thing wrote itself. I showed it to a guy on my course a couple of days later, and he had problems reading my writing at the bits when I'd had a sudden burst of inspiration and my writing became more erratic.
This Summer I finally had a chance to get the screenplay filmed. Mike Handley has made a number of films before, besides which he's a friend, so I thought if it was ever going to get filmed, this would be the right circumstances for it.
So this is the diary of the making of 'Catcher of Dreams'.
(which probably won't even be called that by the time it's made)
14/08/00
After discussions with Mike, we realise that we're going to have to cut one of the characters out of the film. This is for a pretty pathetic reason...there are two girls in the screenplay: Lauren and a friend of hers. Mike's girlfriend Dawn has agreed to play Lauren, but we can't find anyone to play the other girl. Maybe because we don't actually know that many girls...
16/08/00
First bit of shooting! After borrowing a friend's Super8 camera (cheers, Alison!), and struggling the film into the camera, we shot a full reel of footage (and about a third of the screenplay).
The only problem is, we don't know if the camera was recording any sound. The microphone was attached, but either it or the headphone socket doesn't work, or the camera doesn't 'do' sound. So we've got to wait for the film to be developed before we'll know about that. And we don't want to shoot anything else before we know. The problem being, I'm back in Scotland in 3 weeks!
17/08/00
The film's been sent off to the Kodak processing lab in London. Nothing on the packet gives any indication of how long it might take to get back to me ready to be projected.
07/09/00
Still no sign of the film. I guess I'll need to give them a call. The rest of the film will now need to wait until christmas to be (hopefully) finished. Which is really frustrating. Still, it should give us a bit more of a chance to practise with cameras.
09/06/01
I really should have updated this before now... anyway, this should bring everything back up-to-date. Last September we actually did get the film back before I returned to Scotland. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a mishap... we tried watching it on Mike's 8mm projector and, after messing around with it for ages and trying to get it to work, it finally ran the film. Well, ran the film for about 5 seconds, after which it burnt through 2 cells of the film. Bugger. So we still don't know what it looks like. Mike wasn't around when I was back in Sheffield at Christmas, so we couldn't do anything then either, and my attempts to get in touch with him have failed miserably. Oh, but when I saw Mike briefly in January, I found out that he'd split up with Dawn. Still, despite a colossal amount of obstacles, I'm still going to try and get this damn thing finished now I'm back home. I just have to get hold of Mike now...
I have however been able to add some pictures to this page that we took whilst filming.
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