I’m not one for keeping a diary, so I’m writing the next series of blog pieces on the making of A Mother’s Journey with cracked rose tinted glasses. Maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes and also from my experience. Weeks have gone by, so the pain coupled with high anxiety have all but disappeared, leaving me with the feeling that the experience wasn’t as bad as I remember it.
The Book
I guess the first question to answer for my fan of one, is why this story/film? Well my journey into filmmaking started with my desire to see Imagine This on the big screen. Some might say it’s egotistical of me to want to see my own novel adapted into a film, but I feel it’s a story worth telling as a film. But then I would say that because I wrote the book. Anyway to cut a long story short, I wrote the screenplay and I thought I was ready to make a feature. Realistically speaking, I wasn’t. I had no experience as a director and had never been on a film set. Just a tinsey winsey detail I glossed over in my pursuit of funding. Before too long reality hit me harder than a boulder dropped from a seven storey building. I had to make a short film to show potential investors my skills. I made More Cake and was advised that one short film wouldn’t cut it, after all, the first one could’ve been a fluke. And I agree, as great as I might think my first film was, it wasn’t enough, so the solution was to make another short film.
A Mother’s Journey is the result and it is the sequel to my debut novel Imagine This. One of the questions I sometimes get asked is what happened to Lola Ogunwole. The few who read the book really cared about where she ended up after the horrendous childhood she had. I found myself wondering the same thing. So instead of writing a 300 page opus to satisfy my readers, I wanted to continue her story, but using a different medium to tell it. (I’m ornery like that.) Because her life in Imagine This was so miserable, my intent when I started the project was to write a happy story. What I ended up writing was a story about a woman suffering from postnatal depression.
The gorgeous Anna
I don’t have children and I’m not a psychiatrist, so my knowledge of the topic was severely limited, however Uncle G came to my rescue and the first person accounts of women who suffered from the illness, helped me with the tone and pacing of the script. I won’t bore you with the number of rewrites, but the one thing I had to ensure I did, was to write for the budget I had, which at that point was zilch. So snip snip, went the car and office scenes and the other unnecessary locations and superfluous characters. Even the baby got written out of the script and she was crucial to the story. But when one has no funding, then one must find creative solutions to tell the story. Luckily for me, an amazing mother heard about my plight and brought her gorgeous daughter on set for a day. So although I had written the baby out, I was able to have a baby in the film which made a huge difference.
So let me rewind again to a year ago. Script was written and rewritten and still had to go through several iterations. What I needed next was a producer to help me pull everything together. That story deserves its own blog post. What I remember most is the pain of trying to find a producer, only to have said person bail when the going got tough. So while I post this for now, I shall go to sleep, ruminate and invent a different reality. One, whereby it was all alright on the night. 🙂
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