December 9, 2016
Amir Shehata
Alright, well, I was left high and dry and had to react to some major changes. But I learnt an important lesson. It is always better to have intermediate and achievable milestones. In my case, each episode was a major milestone. From my perspective having a finished episode, is better than having a bunch of disconnected scenes. I decided that I’m not going to schedule all Turning Point episodes at once. I’ll schedule one episode at a time, in order to try and have completed episodes.
That more or less worked better than before, although I still had to deal with two major setbacks and both were related to actors who decided to move on to other things before the end of the show. We had finished shooting the first episode, when one of the actors informed me they were moving to a different province. And within the same week, another actor informed me that his workload was getting too much and he had to cut back his involvement.
Well, you guessed it. It was time for a rewrite. By that time we were well into the second episode and about 5 months into shooting. Remember, I learnt not to overburden the cast and crew with shooting too many days a week. So we ended up shooting between 3 and 4 days a week, some weeks were less, but I don’t think we ever went over 4 days a week.
I created an online google document to track everyone’s availability, which aided me in avoiding most of the scheduling conflicts. But let me tell ya, trying to match 20 people’s schedules ain’t fun… like at all. I hated this process, but it must be done.
At the beginning I wasn’t creating call sheets, but depended mainly on emails. However, later on, by the 3rd episode, I had learnt the importance of a properly formatted call sheet. I can tell you it reduces misunderstandings about locations, times, etc, quite a bit. So my advice, make sure you have call sheets. Actually for an annual subscription you can get all this functionality with Celtx. I do recommend them, and I’m not saying that because they’re paying me.
Okay, well back to the rewrites. After getting the news about the two cast members moving on, I started thinking that it took 5 months to film 2 episodes, that’s an average of 2.5 months per episode. If I had to film six episodes that’ll be 15 months. Given that the attrition was 2 cast members in under 5 months, statistically speaking, all cast members would probably leave the show before the 15 months are up. That’s the life of a no-budget filmmaker. I don’t say indie filmmaker, because a project with $1 million budget, could still count as an indie. So I think a no-budget project is a more accurate description.
As I was saying, I started to think of ways to mitigate this risk. What can I do to make sure I have a full season under my belt? The only logical answer was to reduce the number of episodes to only 3. So I re-wrote the third episode to be a season finale. It wrapped major plot-lines and kept some open for a possible future season 2.
I have to speak a little about the 3rd episode. Re-writing on the fly is not an ideal approach, but I found it to be a necessary one. Working on this project definitely made me much better at thinking on my feet, so to speak. I had to find a way to wrap up the season and to do that I had to shortcut 4 episodes that I had already written. SPOILERS AHEAD. The initial idea of the show was to create a "procedural" drama with an over arching plot. Each episode would revolve around Sam helping someone she had a future glimpse about. As she helps them, she gets closer to unravelling the mystery around her disappearance, and the 2 year gap in her memory. But when it was apparent that I will not be able to hold on to my actors for a year or more, I decided to bring the ending of the season to the 3rd episode. I created an entity called MorningStar, which is the one behind Sam's kidnapping. MorningStar is creating a nano computer chip to be embedded in the brain to control people's behavior. But in order to complete their development of the chip they needed top secret research from UltraMed. They turn to Kylan and gang to steal that research. Kylan and gang in turn utilize unsuspecting people to do their dirty work. Kylan's idea is to fly under the radar by recruiting innocent by-standards who wouldn't be suspected of wrongdoing by the police.
I took a month break after we finished filming the second episode to write the 3rd episode. I worked closely with Dudley Christian, whom I learnt a lot from, on the pre-production of this episode.
We made the 3rd episode a lot more action oriented, with lots of fight sequences. We were lucky to work with a group of actors who had fight training and they helped us choreograph all the fight scenes. I have to mention a few names here. Thanks to Hans Potter, Momona Komagata and Mike Li for their help in bringing the fight sequences to life.
However, it appeared that my string of bad luck didn't end yet. About 2 weeks into filming the 3rd episode the Sam actor broke her foot. We filmed as much as we could around her scenes, but I started getting the sinking feeling that if I don't deal with this situation, the episode will not get finished. So we went back to re-writes. We re-wrote a lot of Sam's scenes to reduce her physical activity. We relied heavily on the Kylan and Hester characters for all the action sequences, and created more dramatic scenes for the Sam character. This way we make it less strenuous on the actor's foot. This seemed to work.
Finally, we were done with principal photography. By the time we finished filming the last scene, we've been shooting the show for about nine months. I can't tell you the relieve I felt once we wrapped up the final scene. That was it. The risk that we were not going to finish filming the first season was down to zero. Whew! That felt good.