« Until there are none...rescue one.

It's an exciting Monday. As I learned from reading Dale Newton's fabulous book Digital Filmmaking 101 the first step to producing a movie is to start telling everyone that you're going to make a movie. That way, when people start asking, "Whatever happened to that movie thing you were going to do?" the shame and embarrassment of not completing your project will motivate you to keep working on it.

I'm going to be making a new movie this summer and I'm starting today.

There, I said it.

What's it's about? Well, doing all this work for NJN lately has got me itching to do some doc work of my own, so the film is going to be a documentary about dog rescue. I'm teaming up with my colleague and friend, the super-talented Marianne Ahern who is actively involved with an organization called Rogers' Rescues to make it happen. The group is rapidly approaching a big milestone, the adoption of their 1000th dog, so this is likely going to be the angle for the film. Other than that, we don't have a crystal clear vision for the film, but some of the distribution ideas we've kicked around are making a piece to submit to Current TV, using it as a promotional film for the rescue organization, or making a longer film for submission to doc fests. In true doc fashion, we're just going to start shooting a bunch of stuff and see what we can make out of it.

Marianne and I are having our first pre-production meeting this afternoon and we're going start shooting on Saturday when we travel down to Kutztown, PA to film a dog transport. This is where a HUGE box van full of dogs from a shelter in Bowling Green, Kentucky arrive and a bunch of different rescue groups from NJ and PA meet the van to pick up the dogs they have previously agreed to foster. My understanding is that this event is both heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time, so I'm hoping to get some good stuff. Then the following week, we're going to try and shoot some footage at an adoption event in Newtown, PA. I think we're going to try and follow one dog (or several) through the entire rescue-foster-adoption process which could take some time (weeks to months).

Anyway, I'm really excited to be working on this new project. I'll be keeping a production diary of the film here on my blog so you can follow the progress of this new endeavor and I'll definitely be posting some clips (if not all) of the film as soon as it starts to come together.