From an e-mail received from one of the production companies we sent the Soul Searcher pitch to:
“You have a good script here, but I don’t believe it would work as a small or medium budget film… We could not commit to finance a movie over a $30m budget, therefore we cannot go any further with this.”
Oh how I laughed. And then cried. And then put a shotgun in my mouth. Not really of course – the power of suggestion.
Okay, here’s the thing. We tried to raise money. We really tried. And we’ve failed. We could keep trying, but sooner or later it’s going to drift away as our lives go on. I’ve been working a lot lately, and with an overdraft from my bank and the money pledged by Tim Parkman of Lessons Learned Ltd, we’re talking about a figure that we can… just about… shoot the film for. I put this to James tonight and we think it’s do-able. We’re going to get the crew together next week for a meeting. I’m beginning to feel like the boy who cried wolf, but maybe, just maybe, Soul Searcher could be happening very soon.
We had an informal meeting (aren’t they all where we’re concerned?) with our friend Dave Sewell, an accountant. We talked about our options for fundraising from private investors, business angels, setting up a limited company and so forth. My uncle has been approached to fund a film called The Drop and he passed the prospectus on to me for inspiration. It was pretty dry and didn’t make the film sound interesting at all. The financial stuff didn’t seem very compelling either. We could do so much better. We’d have some cool artwork to put in it for a start.
James and I finally met Mya – the concept designer who has been providing us with stunning artwork for the film for nearly a year now – in person. We explained all about where we’re at with the project at the moment and how useful his work had been for engaging people’s interest. Then he said, “There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you… What’s the story?” To our embarrassment, it transpired that we’d never sent him a copy of the script. D’oh!
We met a lady from Malvern who has offered to help us in our microbudget fundraising efforts by compiling a list of potential local investors and ringing them all up. Her 15-year-old son seemed really into what we were trying to do (he came along to the meeting, since we’d agreed to fix him up with some film related work experience in return for his mum’s endeavours).
I cut the featurette and it’s now available in the video gallery. Developing Soul Searcher, the featurette from this time last year, is also now present in its entirety,
I’ve been rewriting some of Soul Searcher‘s action scenes. At present, virtually all the film’s action is in the form of sword and hand-to-hand fights. James and I decided recently that this would get boring, especially after we saw Matrix Reloaded (which I loved and he hated) and realised that Hollywood is really overdosing on chop socky right now. So we’re starting to convert some of the fights to chases and the like. I’ve also been watching the Ghostbusters movies to get inspiration for new ghostly creatures.
James came over and we shot some live action elements for the videomatics. This involved James taking a piece of cardboard with a smiley face on it hostage. Then we sat down and recorded interviews with each other, as part of our ongoing effort to document the process of getting this film off the ground. I plan to edit a short featurette and upload it to this site soon.
While the rest of the filmmaking community was in Cannes, we were in Canon Pyon. We were visiting Maggie, our development producer, in her natural habitat, deep in the Herefordshire countryside (ie. about a mile outside the city centre, ho ho). We got our first reply this morning to the letters we sent out last week (Channel 5), the first of many rebuttals, I’m sure.
Today I played with Lego. I’d like us to meet with potential miniature FX wizards soon and so I need to film videomatics of the relevant shots. Suffice to say this involved spending two hours in my parents’ attic, scrabbling through big buckets of bricks in floor-bound positions which made me ache much less when I was 10, then setting the (very crude) model up in my flat and shooting it with my trusty Canon XM1. And it’s not over yet, since some of the shots require bluescreen elements and/or a more involved miniature set, possibly including someone’s garden pond. Still, James was telling me that George Lucas used Star Wars action figures to block out the fight sequences in Return of the Jedi.
We sent a few more letters off, and are meeting the development producer again on Wednesday for an update. Meanwhile, down in sunny (I assume) Cannes, Tom Muschamp is engaged in a slew of meetings pursuant to the distribution of Beyond Recognition, the film I DOP-ed on in New York last year. All the best to him.
Busy Soul Searcher day. Our very helpful development producer friend sent a long list of financing options and contact details to us, so James and I spent the day going through this, making phone calls, sending e-mails and typing up our pitching materials. So far we have sent a treatment, character designs and crew info to two sales agencies, a TV station (with mention of a possible series stemming from the film) and also Screen West Midlands. We are also working on getting a mentor on board, an executive producer with a track record in fantasy films whose support would greatly improve our chances of securing finance.
We are continuing our efforts to raise private investment as well, and to that end we have sent out press releases today to all the local newspapers.
We met with a development producer who provided us with some useful contacts and general comments on the commercial viability of the project. Her background is in conventionally financed, theatrically released films, so her take on the whole thing was refreshing, James and I having lived in the land of no-budget/public-funding for so long. Her suggestion was to think about it in much bigger terms, ie. a budget of around UKP850,000, shooting on film. I just want to make it. I really want to make it. This journal’s been going for a year now and we don’t have a single frame of video to show for it. Still, on we plod…