Production Diary - Day One

Production diary. Day one. The budget arrives. I look it over and find that we have to start spending money again on a new film. The Interesting Motion Picture Company is launched. Shooting begins 21 February in the birthplace of the cinema. Alison Castle is going to take us through the bulk of Stanley Kubrick’s archive of material for his aborted Napoleon project. Kubrick kept very detailed notes over every aspect of pre production, including a floor to ceiling chart with a precise minute-by-minute breakdown of every shot in the picture. Brother Kubrick even hired Oxford don Felix Markham and staff to help him catalogue the movements of Napoleon and the fifty most significant people in his life. The documentary will not only look at Kubrick's obsession with Napoleon during the filmmaker's creative peak, but will also look at the cult of Kubrick that includes billionaires and barbers alike. I will be taking a camera along and through the magic of digital cinema I will be posting behind the scenes footage of the making of Thomas Bender’s documentary on Stanley Kubrick. I will be posting rather infrequently between now and the premier of the movie. But what I will be posting in this blog will be choice, with hopefully some cool links to benefit film scholarship and knowledge. Let the free content rain.

The picture of the day is of the camera Thomas will use to shoot the documentary, the Sony EX1. He will be using a Mac Book pro and editing software to render the digital video.

I needed a refresher course in making a movie so I sent for the filmmaking guides from Living Spirit Studios in Ealing. I met with a solicitor earlier this week and started a search for the day-to-day production supervisor here in the UK. A friend from Princeton is trying to hook me up with a local distributor. I announced the start of production to our distributor in Hollywood.