Showing posts with label linked. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linked. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
So I Was Interviewed...
The ever so talented Cindy Rodriguez asked if I would do an interview for a blog based on my production of LINKED. Sure, not a problem. But I must add that being on the opposite end of an interview is a new experience for me. How do you think I did? (Click on the photo below to be directed to the interview.) Thanks again to Cindy for supporting and promoting :)
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
My Tremulous Relationship with Creativity
I've been a fiction writer for as long as I can remember. I think it started when my babysitter/aunt would take me on day trips to the park and then have me write about the experience when I returned. Those short descriptions morphed into full on 25 page manuscripts by the time I was 11, and then 100+ pages when I was 17. There was only one consistent problem; I could never finish anything I started. I had all these great ideas that would include starting and end points, but it was the middle that befuddled me. It was the middle that would haunt me.
That's probably why writing "LINKED" made me hyperventilate.
In its first stages LINKED was just a short film thought up by my friend Pablo and I. Once we filmed it though, it took on a life of its own. People thought it was a webseries and wanted to see more. So, I did what I've always done; started writing with no clear path as to where I was headed. I think I had a short moment where I lived the parallel life of a "Lost" writer. Further turbulence came with the loss of Pablo who had to move away from the project in order to focus on his new engagement and other pieces of his life. Without a director or camera, the project seemed finished without having really started. I was about to forget the whole thing when Jona (Jaime's long time friend and talented horror director) showed interest.
It wasn't until late summer, maybe even September, that I was able to meet with him and chat in person. I told him my beginning, my end, and the flurries of middledom that had no clear landing spots. And he helped. He helped me rule out the things that didn't make sense, that didn't fit the plot, and pull together the things that did. By the end of the meeting I had a storyboard going and all I needed to do was write the dialogue.
I transferred all my bootleg Word doc/scripts to a real script writing program and prepared my own crash course on how to write scripts properly. Over the course of 2 days I pumped out the remaining 8 episodes equalling about 80-85 pages, with little corrections and "What if Gabe said this" moments from Jaime which were very helpful. My friend Henry jumped in to edit tweaks in the first few episodes and entirely edit the last few. It was all coming together to look like an actual series. So finally, we're ready to complete filming. The only problem? It was November and we'd started this project last May. Weather was entirely different and against us in every way. But we filmed.
We cranked out back to back filming days in the first weekend, and another full weekend which just passed. We have one more day to go until I can say the filming portion is finally over. Maybe if I weren't involved as a writer, director, producer and actress it wouldn't be so draining. But, as I look over my amazing crew, I see that it's not just me that is ready to gladly crawl under a rock and sleep for at least a week. We've been busting our asses and from the footage I've seen thus far, it's been well worth it. My production team has been amazing and my actors have fully grown into their characters (to the point where we all keep confusing our real names for character names when talking to and about each other.) It's been quite the experience.
Now that it's almost reached it's point of conclusion, I've also realized it's made me aware of what I'm capable of. Will I pursue a career in any of the several hats I wore during this production? Not so sure, I do like my steady paycheck. But what I do know, is that I can if I wanted to. And maybe that's all I needed to learn....
Mucho thanks to Jona, Henry and Jerry (my clutch AD!) for all the time and effort you've dedicated.
Special thanks to Pablo, for his early involvement and pushing me to get this idea out of my head.
Mike, Jose, Cortes, Paul, Ariobin, Bryan, Amanda, my mom, Claudette, Danny and Frankie for helping bring my characters to life and sticking around on set to support when you could have gone home.
To everyone who keeps watching, commenting and supporting the series.
And a very incredible amount of thanks to Jaime. Besides the fact that you are the star of this show, you have stood by me and believed in me since day one and have fully committed yourself no matter how tired you got. Like Lynn says... "I owe you." ;)
Below are some videos. To my email subscribers, you'll have to go to my actual blog to see the vids (http://www.laurenjrivera.com/). The first was taken after I crashed on day 3 of filming and apparently woke everyone up from my snoring. Very funny, Jona. Very funny.
And if you haven't caught up with LINKED yet, here are Episodes 1 & 2... Enjoy!
That's probably why writing "LINKED" made me hyperventilate.
In its first stages LINKED was just a short film thought up by my friend Pablo and I. Once we filmed it though, it took on a life of its own. People thought it was a webseries and wanted to see more. So, I did what I've always done; started writing with no clear path as to where I was headed. I think I had a short moment where I lived the parallel life of a "Lost" writer. Further turbulence came with the loss of Pablo who had to move away from the project in order to focus on his new engagement and other pieces of his life. Without a director or camera, the project seemed finished without having really started. I was about to forget the whole thing when Jona (Jaime's long time friend and talented horror director) showed interest.
It wasn't until late summer, maybe even September, that I was able to meet with him and chat in person. I told him my beginning, my end, and the flurries of middledom that had no clear landing spots. And he helped. He helped me rule out the things that didn't make sense, that didn't fit the plot, and pull together the things that did. By the end of the meeting I had a storyboard going and all I needed to do was write the dialogue.
I transferred all my bootleg Word doc/scripts to a real script writing program and prepared my own crash course on how to write scripts properly. Over the course of 2 days I pumped out the remaining 8 episodes equalling about 80-85 pages, with little corrections and "What if Gabe said this" moments from Jaime which were very helpful. My friend Henry jumped in to edit tweaks in the first few episodes and entirely edit the last few. It was all coming together to look like an actual series. So finally, we're ready to complete filming. The only problem? It was November and we'd started this project last May. Weather was entirely different and against us in every way. But we filmed.
We cranked out back to back filming days in the first weekend, and another full weekend which just passed. We have one more day to go until I can say the filming portion is finally over. Maybe if I weren't involved as a writer, director, producer and actress it wouldn't be so draining. But, as I look over my amazing crew, I see that it's not just me that is ready to gladly crawl under a rock and sleep for at least a week. We've been busting our asses and from the footage I've seen thus far, it's been well worth it. My production team has been amazing and my actors have fully grown into their characters (to the point where we all keep confusing our real names for character names when talking to and about each other.) It's been quite the experience.
Now that it's almost reached it's point of conclusion, I've also realized it's made me aware of what I'm capable of. Will I pursue a career in any of the several hats I wore during this production? Not so sure, I do like my steady paycheck. But what I do know, is that I can if I wanted to. And maybe that's all I needed to learn....
Mucho thanks to Jona, Henry and Jerry (my clutch AD!) for all the time and effort you've dedicated.
Special thanks to Pablo, for his early involvement and pushing me to get this idea out of my head.
Mike, Jose, Cortes, Paul, Ariobin, Bryan, Amanda, my mom, Claudette, Danny and Frankie for helping bring my characters to life and sticking around on set to support when you could have gone home.
To everyone who keeps watching, commenting and supporting the series.
And a very incredible amount of thanks to Jaime. Besides the fact that you are the star of this show, you have stood by me and believed in me since day one and have fully committed yourself no matter how tired you got. Like Lynn says... "I owe you." ;)
Below are some videos. To my email subscribers, you'll have to go to my actual blog to see the vids (http://www.laurenjrivera.com/). The first was taken after I crashed on day 3 of filming and apparently woke everyone up from my snoring. Very funny, Jona. Very funny.
And if you haven't caught up with LINKED yet, here are Episodes 1 & 2... Enjoy!
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Revolving Around My Weekends
Once upon a time there was an idea...
Pablo: So I have this idea for a short film. It's about this guy...
Lauren: ...that you want Jaime to play?
Jaime:...who is a slacker that's called to do something bigger with his life.
Pablo: So once I cut the trailer...
Lauren: we'll come to realize that this isn't just a short...
Jaime:... it should be a webseries.
And so was born the demolisher of what was left of my free time. But I'm not complaining. Here's why...
Back when I was a wee little writer, my inspiration came from books written by R.L. Stine and later Dean Koontz. I was a sci-fi/fantasy/thriller lover until freshman year of college when suddenly it became easier to write about my own life in the version of chic lit rather than the imaginary stuff that took more brain power. As movies like "Harry Potter" and TV shows like "Heroes" made their way into popularity, I'd kick myself thinking that I could have written things of that caliber had I only tried harder. Instead, I had thrown all creative ambitions to the wind and settled with a job that paid me to do the other thing I was good at; managing someone else's life. So here, many years after I'd packed away previous manuscripts, I was given the chance to reinvent myself and my craft (can I even call it a craft if I haven't been fully successful yet?)
Pablo and Jaime spit out ideas while I worked diligently to string them all into something that... made sense. When the script was finalized and approved by all, Pablo went to work doing what he's good at (finding locations, setting up shot lists, etc. while Jaime and I ran lines. Sidebar-- to that point in time I hadn't seen Jaime act in anything where he wasn't a) a goofball, b) a maniac or c) gay. Gabriel, the character after which the title was named, is just a normal guy and as simple as that sounds, I feared it might be the hardest thing for Jaime to pull off. As we adjusted to the script (oh, and it's "we" because I would be acting opposite in him- this endeavor was triple fold), I became confident that this thing we were creating was in fact, good. And with that in mind, we went to work.
After a six hour shoot and some hours on the editing table with Pablo, this was the first run trailer.
We blasted this trailer on our Myspace pages and through email blasts. The reply that resonated to each of us was the question "What happens next?" with a certain degree of urgency. We had an audience. An audience that wanted more than just a short film. And so became the idea of the webseries.
Off the bat we knew "Missing" for a title, wasn't going to work. Pablo and I were stuck on one word names and symbols. At first stuck on words revolving around "dream" or "missing", it wasn't until I sat through the movie "Iron Man" that I would come across the one word that blazed like a lighthouse beacon. It was a name. Simple and yet strong. I immediately texted Pablo who agreed as soon as he received the text. I took a deep breath. We had a name. Now, we just needed a storyline.
Over the course of the next month I would write and we would film, two more episodes introducing new characters and plot twists. The scripts flowed from my thoughts so easily that I was surprised I hadn't lost my knack for this kind of stuff. As we continue with this series, I will keep you informed of its progress. Once the first 3 episodes have been fully edited, we will begin release. In the mean time I'm hoping to land an exclusivity deal with one of my many social networking connections to make this project fully legit. But in the mean time, it's fun as all hell :)
Here are some on set photos:
Amanda Andujar (Angel), Jaime Fernandez (Gabriel) and Danny Rivera (Danny)
Pablo Diaz and moi
Me, Amanda, Jaime, Pablo and Jerry Diaz (Jason)
Pablo: So I have this idea for a short film. It's about this guy...
Lauren: ...that you want Jaime to play?
Jaime:...who is a slacker that's called to do something bigger with his life.
Pablo: So once I cut the trailer...
Lauren: we'll come to realize that this isn't just a short...
Jaime:... it should be a webseries.
And so was born the demolisher of what was left of my free time. But I'm not complaining. Here's why...
Back when I was a wee little writer, my inspiration came from books written by R.L. Stine and later Dean Koontz. I was a sci-fi/fantasy/thriller lover until freshman year of college when suddenly it became easier to write about my own life in the version of chic lit rather than the imaginary stuff that took more brain power. As movies like "Harry Potter" and TV shows like "Heroes" made their way into popularity, I'd kick myself thinking that I could have written things of that caliber had I only tried harder. Instead, I had thrown all creative ambitions to the wind and settled with a job that paid me to do the other thing I was good at; managing someone else's life. So here, many years after I'd packed away previous manuscripts, I was given the chance to reinvent myself and my craft (can I even call it a craft if I haven't been fully successful yet?)
Pablo and Jaime spit out ideas while I worked diligently to string them all into something that... made sense. When the script was finalized and approved by all, Pablo went to work doing what he's good at (finding locations, setting up shot lists, etc. while Jaime and I ran lines. Sidebar-- to that point in time I hadn't seen Jaime act in anything where he wasn't a) a goofball, b) a maniac or c) gay. Gabriel, the character after which the title was named, is just a normal guy and as simple as that sounds, I feared it might be the hardest thing for Jaime to pull off. As we adjusted to the script (oh, and it's "we" because I would be acting opposite in him- this endeavor was triple fold), I became confident that this thing we were creating was in fact, good. And with that in mind, we went to work.
After a six hour shoot and some hours on the editing table with Pablo, this was the first run trailer.
We blasted this trailer on our Myspace pages and through email blasts. The reply that resonated to each of us was the question "What happens next?" with a certain degree of urgency. We had an audience. An audience that wanted more than just a short film. And so became the idea of the webseries.
Off the bat we knew "Missing" for a title, wasn't going to work. Pablo and I were stuck on one word names and symbols. At first stuck on words revolving around "dream" or "missing", it wasn't until I sat through the movie "Iron Man" that I would come across the one word that blazed like a lighthouse beacon. It was a name. Simple and yet strong. I immediately texted Pablo who agreed as soon as he received the text. I took a deep breath. We had a name. Now, we just needed a storyline.
Over the course of the next month I would write and we would film, two more episodes introducing new characters and plot twists. The scripts flowed from my thoughts so easily that I was surprised I hadn't lost my knack for this kind of stuff. As we continue with this series, I will keep you informed of its progress. Once the first 3 episodes have been fully edited, we will begin release. In the mean time I'm hoping to land an exclusivity deal with one of my many social networking connections to make this project fully legit. But in the mean time, it's fun as all hell :)
Here are some on set photos:
Amanda Andujar (Angel), Jaime Fernandez (Gabriel) and Danny Rivera (Danny)
Pablo Diaz and moi
Me, Amanda, Jaime, Pablo and Jerry Diaz (Jason)
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