Research

Another month, another wave of film fest submissions. We've been getting a lot of e-mails from fests saying either they've recieved Blasto and we're "in consideration," or that they're awaiting to recieve Blasto and are looking forward to it.

I've been getting a lot of "what do you want to see happen" questions. It's usually, "If all goes how you want it to, what will happen with this?" Other than George Lucas seeing it and saying, "That's the man I want to make Star Wars episodes 7, 8 , and 9 with the original cast."

I would love to remake Blasto with a "real" budget. Not tens of millions of dollars, but a couple hundred thousand, possibly even a couple million. My hope is that somebody will see the potential of Blasto to be something better than it currently is. Funnier, more dramatic, a tighter script, a real crew. And to shoot it on HD rather than MiniDV so it'll actually look like a film.

With that goal in mind I've begun to rewrite Blasto. Right now I'm in the research stage, which is learning as much as possible about the characters and their environment. This is the part where you literally figure out each characters history; who are their parents, what was their childhood like, what did they want to be, who are they married to, what is their job, etc. You figure out their lives in such incredible detail that you have very good idea what decisions they will make and why they make them when you put them into the story. Ninety-nine percent of what you create of their history will never make it into the script, but it make the one percent of them that you do see that much more full. This is how characters in films seem flat or cliche, because the writer only went as far as a few sentences into who this character is. I feel this about some of the crew members, Tom, Sam, Eddie. You never really get into them. The trick is trying to get a good deal of the persons history prior to the film story, into the screenplay without them talking about it. I hate when characters just sit down and talk about their past so openly with people they just met (This happens several times in Blasto of course.) These things have to be delivered more naturally.

The reasearch stage will last several months. Have to REALLY know the characters and make sure each of them is so interesting that you could have made a film about any of them as the main character. From the research stage we'll go into the plot/structure stage. That's where others like Kleiber, Ben, etc. get involved. Start discussions about things that could have been better, things we would have liked to have seen, how things can be cleaned up, made more dramatic, funnier, etc.

Maybe I'll post some of the character backstories here next time.