videophage.com

After a night off, we’re back! We completed probably the most difficult shot to pull off tonight, and maybe the last really technical aspect with the camera. From here on, it’s mostly performance-based challenges. Although, next time (later tonight), we do have to figure out how to get the camera to swivel; if not, I do have an easier backup idea. Part one of three is coming close to a close. Part two is where we really get to go crazy because I have planned the cinematography in a way that leaves the space largely open and uncircumcised, so we get to go crazy and have fun with it.

I wish I would’ve documented it before I took them down, but we had to diffuse my bathroom lighting with posters (Drive; Jackass Forever, The Grand Canal Near the Rialto Bridge, Venice), because my skin was too white and blown out on camera. I don’t know if I’ll be able to truly enjoy my own creation because in the back of my mind, I’ll be seeing all the shit hidden just offscreen. It’ll be a different appreciation, but I’ve never watched a (loosely) narrative project as anything other than pure spectator. I’ve known how the sausage is made, but I’ve never made it myself.

There’s only four minutes left on the tape we’ve been shooting on. These last two nights we’ve worked (Sunday and now Tuesday night) have filled it up pretty fast. I didn’t think to overwrite the takes that we decided as absolutely no good. Honestly, I didn’t really know how exactly, but I got it figured out now. I still have another unopened blank tape, fresh in its 2001 packaging, and we can always offload and convert the footage that’s already been shot. We went til almost three in the morning and my gums were in agony from brushing my teeth so many times. It was worth all the pain and annoyance and fatigue.

I’ve been flirting with the hypothetical thought that maybe I would be content with just being a writer if I had a good enough thing going on with that, but now I definitely want to stay on the path of trying everything. Never settle down. Make movies, write criticism, shit, learn an instrument again, try to make my own clothes, live in a van, work construction, move to Europe, present a paper at a conference (a professor told me I had an essay that could certainly be worthy of such distinction). It’s gonna be a hustle certainly, but I think I’m cut out for it; I’m only getting better. We’ll see how my luck fares, I’m still half-expecting that feeling that everything always works out to run out. No matter.