Sunday, 2 April 2006
4:00pm

I

t seems like forever now since the feature film After Midnight I was working on wrapped. There's just so much stuff going on that I often find myself thinking I really should update this site, and be seeing and talking to my friends more often, but it's just so hard to keep up. I'm sorry to all my friends who I've been neglecting for the past six months. In a lot of ways I feel like for these 12 months I've become like a monk but rather than meditating on the balance of Yin and Yang or the ways of the Force or whatever, I've dedicated my life to the study and practice of the art and craft of filmmaking. No time for fun, no time for friends, no time for women, no time for church, no time for family. From morning 'til night I'm thinking about one thing -- making movies.
And I think it's been paying off for me already. Since After Midnight wrapped, I've been working almost once a week (mostly on weekends) on projects outside of school. Filling in as a best boy grip on something one day, gaffing another day, etc., and most of it has even been paid work that was hooked up through people I met working on that feature, or people I've met through people who I met working on it. It even kinda makes me chuckle that I've worked on projects involving some like "B" (well more like "C") level celebrities... like the pizza guy from Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Jerry O'Connell's brother. All in all, I'd say I'm doing pretty well for only being half way through a 12 month film school that isn't exactly the most well regarded one around, haha. Maybe if I'm lucky, by the time I finish I'll already be working on stuff with some "B" level people, haha.
I'm pretty much at the end of my second "term" here at school, and it's been pretty interesting. The atmosphere has changed quite a bit as people have gotten to focus on the things they really want to be studying. We've also moved on to bigger, better, and much more expensive equipment than the Canon XL2's we started out with in the first week. It's been pretty cool messing around with all the gear. It's also pretty cool that we actually have all of it -- sometimes I just do these little camera tests with some folks just on our free time and we end up checking equipment out of the school's equipment room that would end up costing like $1,500 to rent just for that one day if we were actually going out and renting it. I think that's pretty damned cool.
We're actually about to get into our midterm productions so things will start getting really crazy. Collectively as a class we'll be shooting 30-ish projects in 12 days, with three things shooting simultaneously each day. Basically we'll be shooting one thing from 8am-4pm and then after 4pm going and setting up for whatever we will be working on the next day. Should be pretty insane. I'm sure we will find out who is really good to work with, and I'm also sure that a lot of people are going to get their feelings hurt as well, haha.
Recently I found out that all this time I've been going to school two blocks away from a Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. I loooooooooooooove southern food and ever since I found out there was a Roscoe's so close to school, I've been going like... well not quite twice a week, but definitely more than once a week, haha. Yet somehow I am actually still losing weight. I'm actually fast approaching my high school weight. I guess not sitting in front of a computer from morning until night and not drinking a half a bottle of Scotch every night really helps with that, haha. But in many ways, I was only doing that stuff because I was so bored.
Well I'm not bored anymore. In fact, I can't think of there being anything cooler than making movies. Despite the fact that when I do get paid doing this stuff, I'm making like 10% of what I used to make sitting in front of a computer, I am able to wake up at 4am to go to work... something that anyone who knew what I was like a year ago would have thought was damned near impossible. I certainly wouldn't ever have been able to get up that early to go work on a computer or go to a class in college, that's for sure. And I'm finding that even when I know the film I'm working on is going to be a complete turd, I still enjoy working on it. The love of just doing it is really there. And I guess that's one way of knowing that I've really found my calling here.
Unfortunately, due to my monk-like status, I really have nothing else to talk about so I'm sorry if for the six months to come the updates are extremely infrequent and I have nothing to talk about other than film stuff. I'm sure by the time school is out I'll have plenty more free time to be doing other stuff. Just hopefully not too much more free time -- I would like to actually be working on some films at that time as well, haha. Until then, I'll just have to keep apologizing for being such a bad friend and not keeping up with people or having time to do anything else!