Lost and Found

The past few days are difficult to sum up. I haven't had any "free-time" up until today. Even today was busy, prepping the apartment for a nearly twelve hour shoot on Friday. Since this film began a mess has sort of accumulated everywhere. If we're shooting in the office, we'll move things to the living room, and so on and so on. But literally every single room, except the bathrooms, will be used on Friday, which means I needed to haul ass and figure this all out. It would just be easier if everything was already always clean, but that would certainly be too easy.

Why the title? Well, I lost an SD. Oh don't worry, it was found...just two days after it was lost. It took a third time looking for it to actually locate it. I tore apart my car, the apartment, checked the location I thought it may have been left at -- being right outside the Golden Valley City Hall. Nothing. I was going nuts. I was told I was behaving fairly calm for having lost a $25 card with 30 minutes of fresh footage on it. It's the type of thing where you can curse and scream and yell and get upset, or you just go re-shoot it. It's horrible, but it needs to be done, so don't whine about it. Luckily after a shoot last nigh at Rudy's house in Richfield I decided to go back and search for it. I sat at the bench we shot at, turned the flashlight on, pointed the beam at a tree and there it was. It was found. After two days, it was unharmed, not dirty nor wet, but in pristine condition.

I did edit a six and a half minute sequence today.

I've taken over the living entertainment center since Jenn went to Hawaii. Having two monitors is quite handy. Everything opens up and the canvas is whole lot larger. This sequence is something that I feel will get criticized a lot by some people; I guess this whole section of the film. I think people will say there's no focus, this stuff isn't about anything, it's just a long section of nothing related to what the "plot" is about. But that's exactly what I want for this entire movie. That's part of the whole purpose of this story. I'm please with how this has turned out. It's grainy and some stuff is soft-focus, the audio isn't always clean, but that's what I wanted. I always felt this project would be special (not to sound incredibly corny), and I've been feeling it since the first few days of photography, but cutting together this section and seeing it all flow from beginning to end, I can say I'm happy. Very happy.

I hope I learned a lot from my first feature -- at least from an editing standpoint, well, from every point of view. My first feature was choppy with the editing. Unintentionally too. I had eight or nine separate timelines going, and at the end I merged them together.  That was part of the problem, but also because I don't think I understood what the structure of the film was, I think. I didn't know what the rhythm was supposed to be. I know it was a slow build, but there was absolutely no momentum or conflict in the eyes of the audience. There were a lot of little things, and one major thing, but I touched on those topcis so lightly, that when bigger "suspenseful" moments were supposed to take place, the audience didn't understand why it was supposed to be that way. There was, however, one moment I remember where I felt the audience holding their breath -- a slow zoom onto a door handle. That was awesome.

Back to this project. I'm planning for a major night shoot Saturday. I don't want to say what it is, just in case you're casually reading this blog and want to see the final product when it's complete. There's a lot of planning. It's making me crazy, but it's been blocked all out. It's been mapped out. Everything is ready to go. I hope nothing goes wrong that night. We need to stick to a timeline for this shoot. The same goes for every shoot.

I wanted this film complete by the end of September. That didn't happen. I'm about to re-write a scene that was added in late, but I was never happy with. I'm condensing it down and making it make sense.

Some locations are/were being difficult. We still don't have a Pre-School or a Phone-booth or a Gas Station. I found out yesterday morning that the gas station near my house already decided that they weren't going to let me shoot there, but did they contact me? No. I'm having very little luck with gas stations willing to help me out. It's very disappointing.

I will get back to editing for a bit, then off to bed. Here's a picture from a shoot yesterday. I was a one-man show that day. It sucks a lot, but I'm used to doing everything by myself.

Lobby in my apartment. 

Oh, another thing. My fiance is in Hawaii and took a LOST tour. She sent me this picture. JUGHEAD. Awesome.