Kodi’s First Steps to Making a Movie
- Find an idea
- Find an accountability partner
- Don’t think, just write
- Edit, edit, edit
- Keep the process going to prevent fear from stopping you
- Just do it! Follow through.
Let me tell you a magical story about a girl named Kodi and how she made her first feature film. Okay, maybe it wasn’t so magical — but to me it was.
It all started on St. Patrick’s Day: March 17, 2015. I was rudely awakened at three in the morning with an incredible idea. I fought to go back to sleep — tossing and turning, heart pounding; but by four-thirty, I gave in and got up. This idea wasn’t going to let me sleep.
My poor husband was awakened by my restlessness. He asked me what was going on, and I told him I had this idea for a movie — a movie I just had to make. I turned on the light, grabbed a notebook and wrote down a sentence. That sentence was my movie.
Let’s rewind a bit. I’m what you would call a procrastinator. I’m very good at making excuses to not do something where I’m the only person affected. For example, deciding to sleep in instead of going to the gym when I know I need to work out, or eating a bunch of dessert instead of keeping to the diet I vowed to go on because, you know, YOLO.
I had also pledged many times to write a script, a book, a web series, etc. Never had I been able to follow through because other things became more important and “my little project” fell to the wayside. This time was different; I HAD to make this movie. I had no choice really. But, I knew the only way I would get it done was if I made myself accountable to another person.
That evening, I called Erica, with whom I had worked on this small blackbox theatre thing. I didn’t know her very well, but we were friends on Facebook and had talked a bit and I knew she wrote her own episodes for her web series. I told her that I had this idea for a movie I thought was super awesome and could do really well. We talked for a couple hours (and by talked I mean I gushed my excitement) and she was crazy enough to say she’d love to help!
We made a plan to meet the next day at my place. During that meeting, we went over some plot points, character ideas, etc. (Neither of us had ever actually finished a feature-length script, by the way.) After we outlined for a few hours I thought, “Holy crap I have an actual movie in there!” My little one sentence idea had become an outline with an actual story and everything.
Then, we set about writing. I knew I wanted to submit my little film to Sundance (go big or go home, right?), so that meant we had to have this movie written, shot, and edited by the end of August; and here we were in the middle of March!
I created a new script on Celtx and added Erica as a writer and off we went. Our method was pretty much to get as much word vomit as we could on the page, and then go over and edit. Erica works the night shift, so she would write all night, I’d wake up in the morning, read over and edit her stuff, write a few pages of my own, go to bed, repeat.
Using this method, we had our script pretty much finished by the beginning of May. At this point, I said to myself, “Okay, you’re almost done with the script, but you can still back out if you want to. Only you and Erica would ever know. It’s okay.” My fear was starting to set in. To counteract this, I decided to put out some breakdowns and start doing auditions. My anxiety persisted, “No one would ever know, they’ll just think they didn’t get the audition.” So then, I pushed myself to have people send in video auditions. Still, my fear said, “It’s okay, you can give up, they’ll never know. Everyone will just think they didn’t get the part.”
I was beginning to tire of the little voice telling me to stop, so I did something to really shut it up: I cast two of my actors. Now, I’d done it. I was now accountable to Erica AND my two actors. No backing out now. I can’t be one of those flakey Hollywood people who never follows through.
Oh yeah, and my script wasn’t even done yet! We had a few more scenes to write, so I sent the script to my actors, telling them there were a couple scenes to still be added. I also set up times to meet with them in person, talk character and story, answer questions, etc. My first meeting came with Shariffe, who was playing my romantic interest. I was dyeing my roots because we had a red carpet that night for a friend’s movie so I looked all kinds of crazy. (Great first impression, Kodi.)
We went upstairs, sat at the table to get started and out of his backpack he pulls the script. I then proceeded to freak out. I hadn’t even printed it yet! It wasn’t ready! So here sat the very first printed copy of my script. I think that’s the moment it became real for me. Right in front of me was an actor I had cast holding a script I had written.
I was making a movie.
(and to be continued in Part Two…)
*photo courtesy of Dollar Photo Club