Every scene leads to the next

What is the critical reason for why this scene exists? What does it add to the entire story? How does it form its own drama of beginning middle and end, and how does this generate anticipation in the audience for the next scene? If it does this and all it's sister scenes do likewise then when connected together will they create a story that drives from outset relentlessly to the obligatory scene which the audience has been promised but doesn't yet know what it will be!

These are the many questions I am posing myself as I piece together the story of our exepedition to be conveyed in film. The story is taking care of itself, bringing this to life in a compelling manner for its future audience does not.

Being a strategic planner is pretty similar to film director, understanding the subject matter, the audience, what the key reason for the communication existing is and working with your creatively skilled team to pull it off executionally.

Anyway the picture shows my day, post it notes arranged and rearranged providing a platform for writing a detailed word document for a meeting on Wednesday with out film crew ahead of our first major shoot on Saturday.

An inspiration

So we all need dreams and inspirations. For me Michael Mann has always been one since I saw Collateral, just something so asthetically pleasing, I then scoped his back catelogue, Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Ali the list is long, and since then the underrated Miami Vice. When doing some more researching on him I found this Ad he shot for Nike last year, uses the Last of the Mohicans theme tune.

Why I love this in particular is that I actually used this tune when doing the Audio Visual for the British Horseracing Awards Horse of the Year Award in 2006, it is pure gold for sport.

Documentary or feature? The formula is the same.

I was a keen observer of adventurefest this evening at the Vue in Leicester Square. A collection of adventure documentaries I was then in clue finding mode! Using my phone light to make sure I was making legible notes in the cinema on both Sharkman and Big Swell I must have looked a little weird... But I am getting used to that. 

It was only when sat at my desk this evening and started typing up my notes that I realised that documentaries are the same protagonist antagonist battle as your favourite action flicks, The Departed or whatever takes your fancy. The better of the two, or more flowing and engaging to quantify this was Sharkman, and it also manifested the quality of each act being a microcosm of the whole, inevitably the challenge facing the protagonist. This I truly learnt when studying Mackendrick briefly at the London Film School.

As I continue to compile my notes, more to come from next week's films I am more and more confident that I will be able to direct this documentary to a high standard, and indeed it is something that I am relishing! 

Making sense of the FTSE drop

I'm not going to claim to be an expert but this can't be good news. In our own project world I guess it just makes the credit crunch seem even more real, will everyone still make it to the start line for the Everest Test. Will we be able to get a sponsor? We are about to have a big push for a sponsor in a coupple of weeks. I am just relieved that we don't rely on needing a sponsor for the trip to happen!