Here's a thing that's real.

That's a phrase I use a lot. Sometimes ironically. Often not. So here's a thing that's real:

Having gone through all the steps of pre-production, all the horror and agony of assembling a crew and a cast and making 8,000 phone calls and e-mails and shopping for the most asinine things one could ever imagine and writing and rewriting and re-rewriting a script and changing and rechanging and re-rechanging a shoot schedule because of weather or people's availability and finicking about too many details for one human being; finally, a production comes together. On the (good) advice of my DP, four shoot days became two 10-hour days. Having been on 'real' film sets, I count my lucky stars it was only 10 hours. I know this stuff goes 12 or 13 on average in the real biz. And we shoot and shoot, and my panic subsides, and everybody gets along, and we (amazingly) stay right on schedule, and some of the footage I see between acting looks great. And basically, the whole shoot goes fucking fantastic (pardon my French). Couldn't be happier when all is said and done. But this is what we call riding the high of non-sleep and long days and being one of those energetic and spastic sort of directors who's tripping over his own thoughts while simultaneously acting (a high in-and-of itself, let me tell you).

Don't get me wrong, the footage looks pretty darn good, I have to admit. But I made the mistake of being the cool guy. In my production meeting I specifically laid out the notion that "I'm not gonna playback every single take, it just gets annoying and takes up too much time. I will trust my DP to deliver me quality footage." This statement became mostly true. Most of the footage he delivered matched, or came close to, my vision. But now, here in the editing room, I see that some visions weren't exactly shared. And the problem with a zombie movie is that I can't exactly go back and shoot pick-ups that easily. Unless I want to drop another $100+ on dayrates for my make-up artist.

So this is where we get to the part that's real, right now: here I was, under some foolhardy presumption that once my footage was filmed I could breathe a little, that the hard part was over and now it was just editing. Just editing. I scoff at my naive self from two weeks ago. No no, the easy part is over. Now comes organizing soundtracks, going to a studio to record singers, color correcting, messing with too many different file types of HD and too little data-space, rendering, tweaking sound, second-guessing cuts and finicking about too many details for one human being. That's a thing that's real, and it's called being a film student, and it's crazy and insane and why would anybody want to do that... but I wouldn't trade it for a goddamn thing. Not one.

4010 Presentation

This is for Film 4010. Ignore it if you are in 4500.




All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQntZXrhwz4

The hills are alive with the sound of music. Zombie music.

My hand is still stained red from where I put fake blood on it earlier, decorating set pieces. The struggle continues. My room now looks like somebody exploded in there, there's so much blood and fake body part strewn about. But enough of that. Here is a song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NTV-8qRpyk