K&K organized a reading of the 2-17 draft. It was valuable. This is the second reading and each one yielded some good ideas. He is right about it being a good market test, and some scene changes and new scenes came out of it.
The one that stands out is the suggestion to show D&M at the dance club. I think "Dirty Dancing" was mentioned, especially the power of the eye contact between Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. That was a great idea and we've worked out and will add a scene at the dance club that emphasizes eye contact. The location we're shooting the dance scenes is an old night club with a dance floor, so it should work out perfect.
Max and Ronald seem to attract a lot of the discussion. That's not good since they are minor characters. I've tried to reduce the dialog in the Max scene
I've also tried to beef up demonstration of Dewitt's computer skills. And show more of Maria working hard.
I cut out Reflection entirely and replaced it with Heidi all the way.
On the technical front, we decided to go with the Varicam. It comes with a tape deck that you interface to a Mac running Final Cut Pro to download the files from tape, convert to digital and store them on computer disk. I don't know the file type, though. That would be a key question interfacing with editing software.
About the timeframe problem... I agree some indication of time passage would be helpful. How to do it is the question. William Goldman says in Which Lie Did I Tell You that your scenes should come as late into the action as possible. In other words, resist the temptation to do lengthy lead-ins or exposition. I agree with this because I've seen wordy and expository scenes stop stuff dead--some of my own stuff.
Passage of time is difficult to show in a movie. Something clunky can be done: show a "two months later" card or have one of the characters say "remember that lunch we had a couple of months ago".
Dennis told me about a couple of tricks: 1) lengthen fade outs/fade ins. That subtly implies the passage of time; 2) show a montage of scenes--this trick can actually show passage of time by mixing in different seasons or sequence the montage as day/night/day/night.
One lesson I'm learning with Dennis is you can shoot footage while on location with the actors which can be included/excluded, sliced and diced during the edit process. You can also include stock footage if you can show something without the actors. I suppose you could even call back some of the actors for a special shoot if necessary---however, $k-ching, $k-ching.
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