I’ve heard about movies with a troubled production. The disgustingly ironic thing here is that I’m trying to film a movie about filming a movie (yep, it’s a triple layer), and it has a troubled production. In fact, all of them do, every layer of movie-making. Two of those were planned, and let’s just say that one of them is giving me the biggest headache.

I knew this was too ambitious for a student film, but the way things have been going, it’s crossed the line from ‘troubled’ to ‘cursed’. For example, one of the movies (the movie-within-a-movie) has trouble with distribution, because they need some tv antennas and Melbourne professionals have all been booked up. It’s the night of a thunderstorm…I assumed that’d just be a busy time for everyone. So while all that’s happening, one of them tried to fix the antenna themselves and ends up in OUR world, because a lightning strike makes the antenna magical. This is only 23 minutes long, just go with it. So then it turns into a behind-the-scenes style production…except scripted. They need to be zapped by an antenna from OUR world to get back into theirs, but what ends up happening is that it goes too well and they get zapped right back down into the film-within-a-film-within-a-film that THEY were making, and have to get back up again.

The writing process has been a nightmare, not to mention I’m probably going to get angry calls from Melbourne antenna providers because of how I’m misrepresenting their profession. Hey, I’m gonna assume that most folks know enough to tell that antennas aren’t actually magic. Unless you think science is magical…which it can be. Agh, now I have to plan a finale where all the worlds come together, using the incredible technology of Melbourne’s finest digital antennas and everyone goes back to their own world. If I don’t collapse from brain pile-up first.

-Xavier