While most of the time the pre-production (or better, production in general) is very stressful and you almost never have enough time, it´s quite different right now with A Place Of Peace.

I got enough time until the shooting to prepare everything, meet with the heads of department to discuss all the tiny bits and i even manage to arrange the pre-production between my other projects. But i know two things for certain:
- just one little detail could change everything
- no matter how much time you have to prepare yourself, a lot will change and it will get stressful.

But no matter what, spending as much time as possible to prepare yourself is more important than everything. Prepare for everything that can go wrong (which in fact could be everything) – so you can deal with it in time.

So far so good, this is the status on A Place Of Peace:

Soundtrack

Attending the Film Music Symposium really changed my mind about certain aspects of film music.

The earlier the musician / composer is able to get his hands on the screenplay and think about the theme of the movie, the more the production will benefit from it. Music definitely is a powerful tool to evoke and emphasize emotions, so if the music is available before the shooting you could easily use it for rehearsals or the shooting itself. But most important – you don´t have to use temporary music for editing. It´s really hard for a composer if you´ve watched your raw cut a hundred times with the music of Hans Zimmer.

So my plan is to meet my composer soon and talk about the ideas i have about the soundtrack.

Storyboard

I´m not a great illustrator. Really not. But then again a storyboard doesn´t have to look like a perfect pencil sketch – it has to convey the shots i imagine for the movie and give everyone involved a sense of what i´m trying to achieve. So with the help of Stan Lee (How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way) i´m learning how to bring my thoughts to paper.

I personally very much like the way the movies of Susanne Bier are shot, very close close-ups.
What i´m trying to achieve in A Place Of Peace is to have one moving master that´s almost a one-shot in each scene and cut it with close-ups of the actors emotions. While this looks pretty nice in the storyboard we´ll see if the locations support my vision, but i´m pretty confident that i´ll be able to adapt my ideas to the specific set.

We won´t have the time for a lot of shots within each scene, so i´m working on few shots that provide some eye-candy and convey everything they should.

What Else?

Carola, the stylist, is collecting some moods for the clothings and Joana is searching for locations. Angela is casting and i am drawing, so far everything looks quite good – we´ll see how everything develops.

Tags: a place of peace, pre-production, short movie, soundtrack, storyboard