BZK! Scheduling frustration.

I think the worst part of the entire film making process, at least for me, is scheduling. At first you say, "We're shooting on Sundays" and pretty much everyone says, "Yeah, good for me." And then you say "How about this date" and everyone's onboard until one person says "Can't make it, busy."

Now, I'm going to state this before I say anything else. We're all volunteers, I appreciate that. So that means, if you're busy, you're busy. End of story. Sure I find it frustrating, but to be angry at someone for that I'd have to be a huge asshole. If I was paying people, that'd be a different story. I'm not, so we're stuck in scheduling hell.

The delays started pretty early on. My plan was to apply for a grant, which was normally due on May 1st which would have given us plenty of time to make to proposed start date of July 8th. Well, because of cut backs and other government related bullshit, the grant due date was pushed back and pushed back until July 12th - and with roughly an 8 week turnaround, that sucks balls. Still, I accepted that and applied and hoped for the best.

Also, back in the beginning of June, I started an Indiegogo campaign, which I thought with enough effort to promote it we might get just enough money to start on time. Nope. That didn't happen either. Now, not to discuss my own financial situation (which doesn't exist) but I don't have money to invest in this even with the notion of being compensated later.

So we're stuck with waiting. And waiting. While we've had several beautiful Sundays slide by where nothing could be done. Finally, enough donations came in through the funding campaign and it looked like we were all ready to go finally. Awesome. I picked a date about two weeks from now, which was the soonest I could get my shit together and get enough done to actually shoot - only to find out just one out of the 5 people needed was unavailable - and justifiably so too.

So, no problem, how about next weekend? The weekend after that? It was kind of like in high school when you asked someone out and you couldn't take no for an answer - not that I ever experienced that, mind you. Until finally I realized, everyone's schedule was so out of whack that I was now looking well into September before I could shoot with everyone. Not good at all.

So I had to do the one thing I hate more than scheduling and that's recasting. Just recasting one role made everything fall into place. Sure that feels awesome that everything's almost back on track, but shitty that I had to tell someone that just because they couldn't make one date, even though everyone else has shitty schedules too, they were the one that got cut because of it.

It sucks because the whole idea of doing this is to have fun, but the fact that it comes at a price like this tends to sour it a bit - regardless of how awesome it might be in the end, you can never forget you had to axe someone because of one day they were unavailable.

So we're looking at August 12th as our day now, working on July 29th for other stuff and hopefully some evening for another shoot that's been postponed twice. I'm going back on my original idea of Sunday's only because while Sundays are good for about 80% of the cast, I don't want that other 20% feeling like their being shit on. Ultimately everyone's going to have to suck it up a few times and shoot on a day they'd rather being sitting at home hungover.

Work and family obligations I have no issues with, people get sick and who wants to do this shit when they're sick? But when it comes to those few times, and it does happen, people would rather go out drinking because some friend of theirs they only see 50 times a year want to go out, that annoys me. It annoys me because then everyone else has to rearrange their schedule and then I have to do the whole process over again, only to find out the next proposed date is not good for someone else and then we're left waiting 3-4 weeks.

It sucks. I hate it. I'm actually good at it, but I hate it. I will go so far as to say, I fucking hate it. And having to recast to make my life easier, makes it worse. This is supposed to be fun, as I said before, but I guess everything comes at some small price.

Anyway, things are working out slowly, a little more messily then I'd planned, but they're working out. Let's just hope I survive this. I'm done ranting now.