Day two

Kearney sent me some links to new funding initiatives from Film London, our new film body for the capital. Sadly half the links didn't work. While it's great that there are support bodies out there I really wish they'd look at the way they fund shorts. It can take anything up to nine months to get a decision from some of the funding bodies, and to be honest I'm just not going to sit around that long. There are also completion funds to get your film finished once you've started, but they're only any good if you need the money when the scheme is running. Once the date has passed you're screwed. Think it would be much better if they could all have rolling funds so that no matter when you applied there was a chance you could get funding, and you'd find out quickly. Well that's today's moan out of the way.

Did some more work on the script last night. It's about a homeless man and how he got in that situation. Sounds dull and worthy, I know, but I think we've got a script that is much more interesting than it sounds (I would though). I spent ages trying to write this without it being mawkish or overly sentimental, and failed everytime, until I hit on the idea of doing the film backwards. That way it opens with the man on the street and ends with him ready to move into his new home, his whole life in front of him (though we know it's not that much of a future). We'll shoot it normally then reverse it in the edit. This has thrown up loads of nice little scenes, like the fact that the money people give him will now fly out of his plastic cup and back into the hands of the passers by.

The really fun thing with this is going to be blocking it knowing that it's going to be reversed. We need to maintain a normal film language, so if a big emotional scene should end on a close up then when we shoot it we have to start on the close up. I've never had to think so carefully about blocking so early in a production, and I'm really enjoying the challenge. Hopefully in the next two weeks we can confirm our DP (director of photography). It's probably going to beDuncan Telford, who I've used many times before. He's top notch and likes the script. If he could just stop getting so much paid work then we could tie him down to some dates. The bastard. Really looking forward to myself, Kearney and the DP sitting down and blocking the whole script.

May have a lead on an estate to use for the main characters original home. A harder one appears to be finding a hospital. In the film the baby of the main character and his wife, dies, an incident neither of them can really cope with. It ends up with her leaving and him getting briefly committed (that's right, it's a musical). I'm having real trouble finding a hospital to use. Found some decommissioned ones, but they're just in too much of a state, and real ones appear to be too busy treating real people. The bastards.

Still, we're looking at the second week in April to shoot, so we now have about six weeks. Plenty of time for everything to go tits up.