Abstinence

I’ve been so bloody busy that I haven’t even found time to drink! Now that isn’t something that happens a lot in my world. Since the start of this week (if it starts on Sunday, which it seems to do on many calendars) I’ve only have something to drink on one night and in that case it was only three small beers. The other two nights were alcohol free and what’s even more interesting, I didn’t even realise that until I was lying in bed last night.

So what have I been doing? Well, it looks like we found an actor. Now we just have to convince him that he’s found the right project for himself and that without us paying him a cent (a tough challenge, indeed). What’s more, we’ve been running around trying to find a financer and we might have found one, the only problem is that the guy has, so far, been very unreliable.

Kudos to him, though, as it will be coming out of his own pocket. It isn’t a great deal of money, but he’s still bound to feel the sting. What’s more, he’s also trying to get us in touch with one of the biggest (if not the biggest) photographers in Bangalore, to see if he’ll fund the rest of the project and possibly help us out with some technical advice.

The thing is, this photographer has a major problem with the top model coordinator of the town. The two can apparently not stand each other. The first thing the photographer did was ask ‘is XXXXX involved?’ when the answer was ‘no’, he apparently relaxed a great deal.

The only problem is that, even though this coordinator is not involved, I have worked with him some. That might already be too much for this photographer. Yes, we’ve just run into our first political roadblock. I just hope that it turns out to only be a small detour, rather than a dead end.

This short is taking up almost all of our time (that would be my time and that of the producer) with each evening having us running around, meeting people and setting up more meetings with yet more people. It’s been so busy that we’ve barely had time to go to go clubbing or pubbing. For that matter, we haven’t been able to attend many of the art functions that people keep inviting us for, either; and even when we do go, we go purely to find contacts to make our film a reality.

It’s exhausting. Fortunately, if everything goes well it will only be for two more weeks. What’s more, the number of people that we’ve managed to meet as a result of this will make any future work we try to do in this town a great deal easier. At least now we know who’s dependable and who’s just a waste if time.

Believe me, there are a lot of people in this town who are a waste of time. They promise the moon and then don’t even bother to try and deliver. Still, their loss, because it looks more than a little bit likely that either of us (again, me and the producer) are going to try and launch another project here; this time one with real cash involved. These people’s dismal performance on this project will certainly influence the likelihood of us using them in the next one.

But then, many people here don’t think that way. They think ‘short term gain, long term loss.’ They’ve got a lot to learn, but then so do we.