Home from my first production meeting with Ryan and Matt Laumann, who was originally slated to star as Joe the Astronaut but has been upgraded to producer on account of his willingness to perform a metric crapload of organizational tasks. (It went something like this: Him: “Hey, I can help out here.” Me: “OK, you’re a producer.” Him: “Um… OK.”) So everybody say hi to Matt!

Here’s what we worked out: Next week we begin test footage on effects shots (to make sure a giant sloppy joe monster doesn’t look, you know, silly). After that, it’s a long, slow climb to organize cast, crew, and locations. The extensive outdoor shooting the story requires means we won’t start filming for several months, because a) we’d rather not freeze our rumps off in the woods in December, and b) it’s hard to pass off “what a lovely day for a picnic!” if the trees are dead, the sky is grey, and the ground is slushy. The current plan calls for shooting on interior scenes to start in February, with exteriors in (depending on the weather) March or possibly April. It’s likely we’ll be shooting weekends only, to best work around schedules. (We’re not paying, so I can’t complain if the boom operator gives his day job a higher priority.)

Everything else is preliminary – whom we should bring in for the crew, what sort of people we need for the cast, etc. The extended preproduction timeframe means we can afford some slow going in terms of rounding up everyone.

The big item of the day, however: cash money. My original plan to make this a casually low budget production got swatted down hard when Ryan and Matt, who are probably are concocting some sort of embezzlement scheme, convinced me to double the amount I was planning on seeking through a fundraising site like Kickstarter. (OK, not like Kickstarter. We’re going to use Kickstarter.) It makes sense, as it’ll keep things from becoming embarrassingly cheap, and the last thing we want from our sloppy joe monster movies is embarrassing cheapness. With the new, higher fundraiser goal, we’ll be able to achieve regrettable cheapness instead!

So expect a call for your cold hard cash later this week. You can make the check out to Joe the Astronaut.