Paul Zadie

I’m starting pre-production on my next short film project called Broken Promise. In addition to being Director of Photography on this one, I’ll be producing. That means in reality I’ll be serving as the Producer, Production Manager, Production Coordinator, and Catering. I guess I’m really going to need a good 1st AD.

So my first step is doing a script breakdown. I typically use Final Draft Tagger for the breakdown, Showbiz Scheduling (formerly Company Move Show-Planner) for scheduling, and Showbiz Budgeting for uh… budgeting.

Most scripts are written with Final Draft, so this method works. But Final Draft gives me a headache with activation issues. I swear that the people who pirate the software don’t have to deal with the issues that legit customers put up with. DRM and copy protection suck, and only cause problems for the users who pay good money for software and media. I think this has been proven time and again. When are these companies going to learn? I digress.

Showbiz Budgeting works fine, so I’ll be sticking with it for now. Showbiz Scheduling on the other hand doesn’t run on my MacBook Pro because I use File Vault to keep my home folder encrypted. This is the only application that I have any issues with. For some reason, it is unable to find the user’s library folder to write application support files to when File Vault is in use on the system. But whatever. This is a fantastic piece of scheduling software. It runs fine on my Mac Pro, but I need to be mobile, and I’m not going to sacrifice the security of my documents and all of my hard work just to use Showbiz Scheduling.

I have been writing with Celtx and I have had very few complaints. So I decided to give Celtx a try for prep on this project. With the recent release of Celtx 1.0, I figure it’s time to put it to the test as a real pre-production tool. It makes it easy that Broken Promise is only seven pages. If it works out smoothly, I’ll do prep on my upcoming feature with it.

The first step to ridding yourself of the inconvenience that is Final Draft is to open your script in said inconvenient application. Then save your script as an RTF file. Import that file into Celtx, and it should recognize all of your formatting. Here’s where I ran into a small glitch. There were a few instances where an action line got caught at the end of a line of dialog. It was formatted properly in the RTF, but went a little wonky on import. No big deal this time. It only affected the last two pages of the script, and was an easy fix. This may be a bigger issue with a feature length script. Or may be no issue at all. It could have been a formatting error somewhere else in the pipeline. I’ll have to test it with a longer script. I’ll get back to you with the results.

That’s it for now. The next step is the script breakdown.

It was recently brought to my attention that all of the links to the production forms on the Free Stuff page were broken. I re-structured this site a few weeks ago, and obviously I missed something. My appologies to anyone who tried to download the forms unsuccessfully. The forms are all available now, so download away.

Big news in Zadie Land! Eric Miles has been working on a script called The Dockmaster. It’s been through a few revisions, and he sent it to our contact at Quantum Entertainment a couple of weeks ago. She really liked the script and offered to help us get name talent. Well, she came through by setting us up with Michael Pare. Michael is interested in playing the lead role of Officer Mergensen in the film. And based on a combination of the script, the director (Eric), and Michael Pare’s involvement, Quantum Entertainment has guaranteed us domestic and foreign video releases. This is big news in the CreativeLogic camp. Having a distribution garantee, and name talent attached should help us in securing the financing needed to make this movie. Stay tuned for updates.

My production company, CreativeLogic Entertainment, is beginning production on a cartoon entitled Bobby Bo Bodeo. The screenplay was written by my partner, Eric Miles, and is a half hour (actually 22 minutes) 3D animated children’s show targeted at four to eight year old children. Bobby Bo Bodeo is a really fun show with rhymes, games, educational value and a bunch of neat characters.

Writer/Director Eric Miles and a small hand full of actors from Universal Studios Orlando make up our cast. The four of them are voicing twelve characters for the pilot episode. The first rehearsal was last night. It went very well, better than I thought. At first I was skeptical about such a small cast pulling off the wide range of voices that the show requires, but it seems like it’s going to be great. We may be pulling in one additional cast member for the voice of Bobby Bo Bodeo’s younger brother Billy Bil Bodeo. That was the one voice that everyone gave a shot, but no one really got it. Pre-production is complete. The animators at Flicker Mill have the storyboards and character sheets, and are currently building all of the 3D assets. We have another rehearsal of voice talent on December 6th, and then it’s off to the recording studio to lay down the voice tracks on December 13. That’s when I start editing dialog and creating a rough animatic using the storyboards and temp music.

Production forms have been added to the site. You can find them under the Free Stuff link. They are all in MS Word .doc format. They will also be available in PDF format shortly on the same page. I have some other miscellaneous documents for that page, like story board sheets, that will be going up soon. Go ahead and download the forms and enjoy.

The links section is now live. This is a quick list of some sites that I find most valuable to making movies. There will be some more on the way as I pick through and choose the most relevant filmmaking resources that I can find. You will notice that a Free Stuff link has been added. I am going to be putting up links to all kinds of free stuff for filmmakers like screenplay templates and free magazine subscriptions. I have been on a hunt for open source filmmaking software, and I’ll post links to all of the free goodies that I come across there as well. There will be reviews on much of this open source software soon.

If you have anything that you think is valuable to independent filmmaking and would like to contribute to this site, feel free to contact me. I am open to just about anything. If you have links, documents, or if you would like to contribute by posting articles, or even comments, please feel free to do so.