Happiness is this kind of weekend

For the first time in my life, I feel like I actually directed. The act of directing. I've never felt that before, and it was only possible b/c I had a crew. I had people I felt comfortable relying on. We all knew our jobs and so when something particular needed to be done within a certain realm, whosever it was just took it on w/o question b/c they knew it fell into their domain.

I use to be afriad to ask people to do a very particular job. I was worried I'd hurt feelings or come across as self important. ("Why don't you just do that yourself Kelly? Or do you think you're too important to remember what time this shot is suppose to be finished?!") Now I realize that in a groupwhere everyone has a clear line of their job, a day can run totally smoothly. Amazing. I never felt the need to apologize or explain. Everyone just worked. Problem solved. They picked up a task w/o question as soon as they realized it fell within their role. Each and every one of them. Amazing.

Sun

At some point last night the fog lifted. I don't know if it was when Z and I stepped in front of a friend's FCP class at the local college or later walking out of Taco Bell with comfort food. I don't know, but the thick anxiety that has been making house in my brain finally left for greener pastures. It threatened to return for a moment this morning but for the most part I have been free to battle the complexities of preparation w/o also having to battle myself.

Math is Hard

I always forget how absolutely exhausting filming is. There's always another shot. Another set up. Put this up. Take that down. A never ending stream of watching the sun shift up and then down and you're on a race against it.

So what I thought would be two hours, morphed into, well, 9. We had lunch. There was some printing trouble at the beginning of the day to rile us all up right away. We saw the Albany Fire bring out the Albany fire speed boat and search the river for a lost dog. No really. Jazzy. And now we're back and I am logging lessons learned and will begin on flowers perhaps in the morning.

Lessons Learned:
-Don't use pngs when working with InDesign. It fucks w/ the printer and makes your boyfriend angry. (And rightly so.)
-Maybe don't use InDesign at all.
-Print all necessary storyboards days prior.
-Give actors an action where their emotion changes. For example, "You become sad about the dog when your paintbrush hits the paper." I need to go back through my storyboards and come up with those action/emotional ties.
-Give them a starting action that begins before what you plan to use in editing. That way they aren't just starting at the beginning of the scene. Give them a little chunk to get into it. Same for the end of a scene.
-big coats obscure all costume changes so yeah.

That's it for now. I'm sure as I'm editing together the test I'll learn a lot more.

Now time to over decaffeinate and try and relax.

One, Two, Three

Shooting is not intuitive for me. My instinct as to where to place a camera is in one word: wrong. I shoot like I draw. Flat. Profiles and head ons. Then I try and translate those directly into a visual frame and something always seems off. I can never explain what exactly it is. But like in a dream where there is a reality that makes no translatable sense once the lights come on, so is my translation of what I see in my head to what I see behind the lens. And I never realized until the last three days it's b/c I don't have realistic ideas in my head. Literally the shot composition in my mind has a feel to it, but that feel won't exist if I actually shoot it that way. I have to relearn everything. Thank God I can finally start.

So tomorrow we are doing a test shoot for Plein Air. Fast and furious. Three of us guerrilla style. And every time we place the camera I am going to think three things:
1. Shoot the action at a 30 degree angle
2. Set the camera below eye level and shoot up
3. Create depth. Make sure there is a foreground, a middle ground and a background.

That is my mental checklist. That will be how I begin my shots. From there I can tweak, but until it is a natural instinct for me to place the camera this way, I will literally be counting one, two, three each and every time.

Shooting is now officially finished! (And was a few hours ago but I was editing and then watching Hulu while my brain cooled off.)

Woohoo! Now time to take it all down. A lot of work for like 6 total hours of shooting and what will be a minute final project.

(Also, I slept on the floor last night under a large piece of felt.)

Animation Update

Why does this kind of work always take longer than it should?

I've been working today now almost 7 hours on the set build and it still feels so far from completion. The mistakes are starting to show and I can feel myself losing patience. The three main components I have left are a US Postal truck, a mail box and the letter itself. Oh and putting the main character back together again. His torso fell apart. See? Hot glue only lasts so long and I literally started the main guy back in May or perhaps earlier even. With magnets I know I can construct a better torso (so it might be good he fell apart in the long run) but right now my brain is too tired to come up with creative solutions, and I'm worried I'll hurt him more. So I'm taking a break. I'll go pet cats. Lay out in the sun. At 6:30 I'll drive back to Corvallis for a 7pm meeting. After that's over (for the love of God hopefully no later than 9) I'll head back here and finish constructing. I really think I can make it.

Animation Nation

So this weekend I may have coated my lungs with a fine layer of spray paint. Spray paint, I might add, that melts Styrofoam. How do you decide you're not going to use a certain color on a tiny stop motion house? When the color begins to melt your walls, that's how.

So I've not accomplished nearly as much as I should. If I had had a schedule I'd be behind. But things always pop up. Like I decided to make a tree. Hot gluing individual pieces of yarn onto a wire frame apparently takes awhile. If I had been keeping track I could have told you how many NPR podcasts it takes to make a yarn tree, but alas I cannot.

So tomorrow I'm jogging at 6:45 and will hopefully be back at the studio no later than 8:30. I still have mailboxes, eyes, and houses to finish but I'm infinitely closer than I was on Thursday night when this all began. (Actually many many Thursday nights ago this began.)

Tomorrow will still probably be almost entirely a build day. If I get my first shot off on Tuesday morning I'll probably be fine. Wednesday it's back to work...and my parents even in their infinite resilience to my crap have their limit. Also, hot glue doesn't last forever. I had to repair major parts of my main character due to hot glue decay.

Oh also, I cut my finger in my paper cutter. Nothing severed. But. The joint of my left thumb is going to hurt like a mother tomorrow. Luckily I didn't have to retrieve any of my skin off of the blade. Also luckily it happened on one of the last slices for the white picket fence.

So on that note! Good night.