There is a great thread over at DVXUser about Adamo P. Cultraro getting his film, Corrado, off the ground. It’s a fascinating and inspiring read that I suggest any budding filmmaker check out. The thread is over 170 pages starting with preproduction and ending with the distribution of the film.
Align your own stars. That’s my take away. And that’s exactly what I am doing. It’s not one big push (Which was my major short coming last February when I first tried selling Earthquake) it’s a loooong race.
So where does that leave me and Earthquake LA? First of all, I am abandoning my previous theory of secrecy behind the project. I plan on being Chase Jarvis about the entire thing (That will make no sense to 99% of people here. If you want to get it, click the first link and watch Chase’s hour long presentation. What’s a photographer have to do with filmmaking? You’ll get it after watching).
Here is my plan of attack:
Step 1: Come up with a kick ass idea. — COMPLETE – A big earthquake hits Los Angeles. It traps five people with interconnected pasts in luxury apartment complex. Things get all LOST like. The earthquakes don’t stop. The pasts of our five heros are slowly revealed as they try to escape. It only gets worse.
Step 2: Hollywood hates to read. Show them something — COMPLETE – You see the result of that one post below. We originally cut a 2 minute teaser pilot. Things have changed a lot since then (Story wise) so it’s not totally relevant. During production in November things were crazy and we were not able to shoot all 8 pages. 3 pages of dialog were cut. Those were 3 important pages that under normal circumstances would have been shot. Regardless, the teaser shows production value, tone and scope well enough that it should entice someone to read the script. That’s the point of it.
Step 3: Get it OUT- That brings us up to the present. The teaser and script to Earthquake LA has been sent around to most of the major online content players. I’ve also got some… less traditional methods I plan to employ. I’ll give more insight into that once it gets going.
Note that Earthquake LA was originally conceived to be a web / new media show. It’s big but contained enough to work for under $1 million for 120 minutes of content. The flip side of that, of course, is it can be totally let out of the bag and made for network TV. What remains is interesting characters and a high concept. I am hard at work, in between everything else, writing a network pilot. That’s 30% 80% done and fairly easy to write since everything is already mapped out. All I have to do is make it BIGGER. And that’s fun.
Stay tuned for a whole lot more.
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