… and Looking Ahead

It’s been a year since I first announced Filming Florida last October. It was January 1st when I started pre-production and the Daily Species series. Today, I am excited to announce that in just over two months, on January 1, 2015, I will be officially starting full production. This means I will be in the field full time, and media creation and storytelling will be my primary focus. That means I have just over two months to wrap up the rest of my preproduction tasks and be ready to go on January 1st.

I’ve got a lot to do and I can’t do it all on my own. Today, I am officially launching a fundraising campaign that will build upon the momentum of my first grant and other donations and raise enough to sustain this project through at least six months of field work. Check back on Wednesday for the full details and breakdown of this fundraising campaign and learn how you can help.

In addition to fundraising, I have spent a large part of the last few months focused on the story I want to tell. I am currently dedicating a large part of each day to focusing on story development and research. Nothing is more important than the story, and the research for each of the eight episodes is proceeding nicely. I’ve got some strong outlines and sequence lists and will slowly be building out shot lists and scouting locations. Between now and the January 1st launch, I will be spending a lot of time taking these lists and outlines and making them more concrete, determining best locations and times to shoot and penciling in a schedule on my calendar.

Finally, as the story develops, I am working on lots of technical details and testing new gear, and at times even building new gear, to capture the images required for the story. I’ve spent a lot of time soldering circuit boards, testing out solar panels and chargers, and calibrating time lapse systems. I’ve been finalizing my digital workflows for all the different cameras and devices and figuring the best way to capture, store, edit, and archive this incredibly diverse range of materials. I’ve made huge progress on all of this but still have a lot of gaps to fill. There’s still a lot to do and I will be sharing these stories with you in the next few months.

I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am to begin the field portion of this project. After all, the field work and filmmaking is what I live for and to finally shift my focus to the production part of this project is incredible exciting!