NFTKK diary #4: pre-production meetings

So far, so good. Things are moving ahead with a short film project Notes From the Kuerti Keyboard. We've had a few more bumps along the way, but nothing too terribly out of the ordinary. In this last stretch, the worst thing was that our wardrobe person came down with a bad case of arthritis, which made his clothes shopping difficult if not impossible. Luckily for us, he already has some suitable items on standby in case he isn't able to go looking for anything else.

The biggest issues in these last few days has been scheduling. Most of us are very busy over the next couple of weeks before we shoot. The Hot Docs film festival casts a large shadow over us because many of us work in the documentary field as well. Not only does my co-filmmaker Katarina Soukup work mostly in the documentary field, but so do some of our crew members. Besides, not only are most of us filmmakers, but we are also avid filmgoers.

Nonetheless, this takes priority. Inevitably, we've had to schedule some meetings during the festival. Katarina is based in Montreal, but comes to Toronto today for both the festival business and our film shoot. We have our first meeting with our Director of Photography John Tran on Sunday, May 2. That happens to be his birthday, so we really appreciate him making the time for us to do a bit of work on such an occasion. We'll go over our shot list and get a better sense of how the days will flow, and how much equipment we'll need.

On Monday, we'll have our tech scout. That's when all of the key people from the crew visit the locations to figure out any practical issues that they'll have ahead of time. That was a difficult thing to schedule, and that task was well-handled by our A.D. Louis Taylor. It was difficult because one of our locations is almost constantly in use, so it didn't leave us a lot of options. On top of that, we all have tight schedules too.

We never were able to find a time that was suitable for all of us, but we came close. Our gaffer won't be able to make it on the Monday scout. Fortunately, someone else from the lighting department will be able to attend and provide his input. Hopefully, it won't be too complicated. We're also fortunate that John has already filmed in one of the locations, so that gives us a bit of an extra jump on things.

Right after the scout, we'll have a quick production meeting, where we'll all go over the material and everyone gets a chance to raise their concerns, make requests and comments, or speak their mind about anything relevant to the project. We have a smaller crew than most, since the nature of the film is non-narrative. That helps simplify things in some ways. I'll let you know how it goes.