First came the script: the idea of chemistry developing between a secular lesbian and a recently separated Orthodox woman arrived a long time ago, but telling a compelling story in an independent short was there from the beginning. After many years, various titles, and numerous shifts in focus, the script made huge gains with the attention from my writing group, 41N 87W. "Your story starts at page 15," they told me in 2009, and they were right. In early 2011, I said to myself—probably aloud—"All you've ever wanted to do is make a movie, so go make a movie!" A Chicago Filmmakers screenwriting class in got the screenplay within striking distance of creation. Producer Etta Worthington applied her expertise late in the year, and now, Hatboxes is locked down and ready to shoot.
Which means that whatever is on the page today may need to change once we get on set in June. Whatever's best for the story.
Which means that whatever is on the page today may need to change once we get on set in June. Whatever's best for the story.
Next came the storyboards, which for Hatboxes look like a graphic novel by someone who is competent with a pencil, but who hasn't dedicated a lot of time to drawing. Round 1 was good for the trees (six images to the page), but if you don't have a single image per page, it's hard to move them around. Hard? Impossible. Plus, the scale of the boxes I was drawing in was too small for my skills—I needed more room (I felt like a kindergartner with a fat pencil). And then there was the fact that pencil didn't scan well at all...so round 2.5 featured me and a Sharpie getting reacquainted with each drawing.
There are 123 of them. That may be overkill.
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After the storyboards came the overheads. Imagine those schematic drawings of office cube farms showing the chairs, the desks, the filing cabinets, and maybe circles within flattened ovals representing a human figure from above. Overheads are great for discovering logic bombs in the storyboards: in shot 15, character X is on the left, but in 16, she's on the right. Was her move intended? Why did she move? It has to be better to work out these kinks on paper [sic] than on set. Planning is a gift to your future self.
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And then came the shot sheet, a list of all the shots that squares with the script and storyboards.
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And then came the shot sheet, a list of all the shots that squares with the script and storyboards.
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I can't wait to review these with our director of photography.
I can't wait to review these with our director of photography.
Stay tuned...
Susana Darwin
April 2012
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