videophage.com

It’s been a week to the day that we’ve been working on Dark Chamber, and tonight we’ll finish part one of three; therefore, we can finally escape the swamp ass by candlelight of my bedroom. Last night was the worst in terms of the heat and exhaustion, I would say. I had only two shots scheduled, but my god, the second was the hardest to pull off yet. Forget the intense choreography of camera and actor from Tuesday night (see “Production Note #2“), the amount of work I had to do just to be able to even begin shooting was maddening, and my brain was not at peak problem solving capability (I blame humidity that adds 10 degrees and McDonald’s for dinner). I wanted the camera to swivel, but how the fuck do you do that when both actors have to be onscreen? (I realized after the fact that I probably didn’t even need to be in the shot because it was so dark, so no one would know the difference, but alas. Even then, I much prefer the inhuman quality of the pan inspired by the ending of Coppola’s The Conversation or a one-off gag shot from the Wayans-produced A Haunted House. I needed the camera to reflect being a camera, but not necessarily within the diegesis. So, I took maybe an hour or so to rig a contraption that would swing the hefty camcorder in a semi-circular motion. All it took was an ironing board, an oscillating desk fan, two shoelaces, four books, and a CD player as a counterweight, so the whole operation didn’t crash on the floor after a few rotations. I think because there was so little to shoot that we were dragging our feet and giving in to the heat exhaustion, but we pulled through. The execution was minimal, but the prep was a drag. Plus, we accidentally found ourselves embarking on an entirely new artistic project that I can only loosely describe as internet performance art that’s quite brilliant in its simplicity, which we’ll get into tonight as well. We’re slowly building out a web of interconnected efforts that will form some sort of DIY, choose-your-own-adventure, decentralized (anti)narrative (anti)collective of sorts.