Time keeps marching on and on.  We're less than three weeks from shooting King of the Dead and in a lot of ways it seems like a dream...  in others, it's quite real.  There's a constant flood of emails from BasecampHQ, our project management software, as we tighten up each little thing.  At this point, focusing on the first couple weekends of shooting and finalizing things that, in any Hollywood production, would have been taken care of months ago.  Things like, location agreements (where are we gonna shoot that hallway scene?), actor contracts, hiring a carpenter to make sets for us, figuring out how we'll feed the cast and crew (this is my job, for now at least).  It's quite a lot of work, and it's easy to see how big productions cost so much money.  At some point, it becomes business and everyone wants to get paid decent money for doing all this work.  Where we're at, pay-that-can-be-lived-on is just not going to happen so there's always the question:  "How can we get this done for free or cheap?"

That said, it's really impressive the kind of talent we've been able to recruit to all departments.  A real lesson, for me, was sitting in on our first auditions which were held a few weeks ago at Lucky Number Grill on Milwaukee. I showed up late, so I missed the first few, but no matter...  there were hours to go.  Each actor read the same lines for each role, so I heard the same lines read over and over.  We probably saw about 40 actors and actresses; some of them read for multiple roles.  I thought back to the interviews we'd been conducting for QA Manager at my "real" job and how we'd spent hours trying to get just a person or two who might be qualified, then a few more hours talking to each person...   Not so here.  We had our pick of 10 or more people for each role.

Also really impressive, for an outsider like myself, was to see how each actor's mental image and corresponding portrayal of the characters differed.  Carolyn is a bitchy museum administrator...  but how does that come across?  When she tells Sayeed he's late, does she check her watch?  A blackberry?  Does she just *know* he's late because she's that type?  Another character was so generic in the script that they could be male, female...   pretty much anybody.  So we got some really wildly variable reads for that one.  One actress let out a truly blood-curdling scream at such a tremendous volume I still can't believe the police weren't called.  It was pretty cool, because after seeing a few of each character, it immediately stood out to us who was really great.  Unfortunately, the flip side of having so many talented people means that, of those we saw that night, only four (I think) got called.  Fortunately for us, we got some *extremely* talented people.

Stay tuned for an amazingly exciting post about shooting scripts, schedules, call sheets, and the like...