In my senior year at El Modena, the big Spring Musical was going to be Oklahoma! (emphasis not added). The auditions for that ambitious production were hugely successful, in that a ton of very talented people -- including many who'd never done anything with the drama classes -- were discovered and added to the roster.
But no matter how many ways the producers cut it, they just couldn't match the particular talents of those kids to the needs of the various roles in that show. They knew they had an amazing cast; it just wasn't an Oklahoma! cast.
So they scrapped what they were doing, and spent an entire night digging through dozens and dozens of musicals, trying to find a show that would be a solid fit for this impressive group of earnest kids. They landed on The Pajama Game, and that production turned out to be fucking AMAZING.
Sometimes you have to tailor your work to your available resources. Sometimes that gets you a far better result than what you originally had in mind. The shark in Jaws didn't work right, so instead we got to see a fin and some yellow barrels, and it was fucking brilliant.
For most of 2013, I was trying to make my Portal short film with a group of talented, earnest young artists. But we were spinning our wheels and getting nowhere, stalling out due to a shortage of texture artists, myriad technical hurdles, a bloated pipeline... you name it. And that was just from trying to put out a 30-second teaser. I've been trying to emulate a major studio's production methods, but what I have is an indie production crew. I've been trying to make Oklahoma! when I should be making The Pajama Game.
I don't have a major studio's resources, and I shouldn't try to pretend that I do. What I do have is a group of people with a very specific set of skills. Time to Neeson this bitch.
No comments:
Post a Comment