It’s hard to believe it’s been two weeks since my team and I wrapped production on Cerise. And as I spend my mornings off from the university cutting and shaping the initial edit of what I hope to be my greatest short film yet, I have been flooded by new ideas that are demanding attention.
Here’s a quick glimpse of what’s swimming the horizon line of my mind’s eye:
Café Mnemosyne – Because of the poet in me, I’m doomed to think in terms of brevity all the time; short poems, short spurts of written insights, and short films. There are a multitude of short film ideas taking up kilobytes on my iPhone’s Notes, but one of them has made it out of its electronic appworld and found its way onto index cards: Café Mnemosyne. Ancient Greek mythology and the Twilight Zone blur their remote landscapes in this very strange vignette.
I’m hoping to start on a first draft sometime in the next month or so when Cerise gets a little more put together.
Caput – I’ve also cooked up a brand new premise for a feature-length screenplay, an action movie in the vein of Hudson Hawk which I hope will simmer into a full-flavored broth reminiscent of the darkly comedic horror of Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. This is of course a long-term project, but I’ve already got a few pages of notes and a pretty involved story on my hands.
And, of course, I’ll be working on my hyper reality post-post modern retelling of the first and grandest epic of all time––Gilgamesh.
Okay, I’m not really working on anything Gilgamesh-related, but I’m still boggled that no one’s thought of adapting this to film. I mean, they made Beowulf, and…actually, nevermind. Let’s move on, shall we?
Update: Cerise – The (very) rough cut of Cerise is about 80% finished, but of course, it’ll needs much more work on it before it’s even in the same ballpark of the cut I have in my head. So far, though, I’m extremely pleased with the story that’s visually unfolding on my monitor. By this week I should have a full cut of the film, which will then need to be trimmed down to get it into the vicinity of a 20-minute short at most (that will no doubt prove the toughest challenge yet!) But I’m game, and I’ll keep you all updated with the progress.
To whet your appetites, the first teaser for Cerise should be up and running very soon. It’s a 30-second taste of the main conflict of the film. I’m currently looking for some music to lay over it, so if anyone’s got a little Jon Brion-esque medley (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I ♥ Huckabees) I could borrow for this teaser, feel free to send it over to me.
Update: The Little Vampire Feature that Could – I’m looking forward to working on my vampire feature A Beautiful Unlife again. While I work on this final polish based on suggestions from my trusted script analyst Michael Ray Brown, I’ve also decided to pull a Cohen Brothers and begin work (writing and planning, that is) on a trailer for the film since the better part of 2008 – 2009 was spent submitting to just about every studio in Hollywood. The script was also pitched at the 2009 Screenwriting Expo, and a former draft even landed on the desk of William Morris Agency. The feedback was mixed, as is to be expected (after all, in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything”) but some concerns were the same, like “the script needs to be genre specific” and this, the concluding lines of the WMA rep’s epic email:
In order for this to connect solidly with audiences, more focus needs to be placed on the comedy and less on the vampire elements.
Naturally, I agree with both of these points, from a business standpoint. However, I’m pretty certain I’ve got a semi-original tale here, and while I’m hard at work validating the love story between my vamp protagonist and the cynical young woman he loves and architecting a brand new finale that’s a bit more cathartic than my current one, I think it would behoove me to make a trailer in the vein of Fede Alvarez’s Ataque de Pánico ($500 & lots of green screen) to better showcase the possibilities of this film as is and prove that there’s a demand for it despite it running the gamut between five genres and being only darkly comedic when Hollywood apparently would like this film to be the next Once Bitten or worse (gulp) another Twilight! How ’bout you? If you’re a writer or filmmaker, how have you handled this sort of criticism of your own work?
That’s all for now. More updates as they burst out from the innards of my manvelope! Oh, and as you may have noticed, I’ve officially made the switch from Blogger to WordPress as the main host for this little brown extension of my brain. Admittedly, I’m not the most technologically adept guy on the planet, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to respond to the wonderful comments my posts were receiving on Blogger. That, coupled with the fact that I’d lost about two posts in their entirety made my decision all the more swift.
So please, if you like what you read, subscribe to my blog at https://trigonis.wordpress.com.
Oh, and look out for my upcoming post on short films that have impacted me the most, as well as a post I’m currently co-writing with Marinell Montales offering up tips on how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign.
JOHN T. TRIGONIS 