Piles of You Know What

We had impromptu guests (in addition to a non-impromptu guest) on Saturday. It was a rare and delightful occurrence. We all discussed Z and my moving to Portland and then the ones who hadn't yet seen our apartment got the tour. (It takes about 5 seconds.) As they were passing my studio, one looked in and said in disbelief, "Wow. How are you going to move all of this stuff?!" I was a few rooms away, heard the remark and felt the associated embarrassment. Nerve struck. Even though the entire evening had been beyond pleasant, I still wondered if our guests thought poorly of me seeing the one space in the apartment that is fully under my care.

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.

On the Topics of Knights in Shining Armour

Z and I spent 4 days down at the Southern Oregon coast with some close friends. The topic of romantic notions came up and we basically distilled it down to this:

Women (in general) grow up with the romantic daydreams of a man riding up on a white horse and saving them. But more than saving them, choosing them. Picking them out from all the other women in distress and saying, "You."

We wondered if men had an equivalent of this female notion of romance and the guys said that they thought it was being the knight. They wanted to be this strong man that could fight and win for a woman. But then they also said that they wanted to be able to fight and lose and still have the woman see their value and choose them.

It was comforting somehow to think that the white knight wasn't just our (female) story alone. That maybe the story isn't created just for little girls but for little boys as well. Little boys who dream of being that for the woman they love. To be, in the end like the woman, picked out of a crowd. "You."

(Also cleeeeearly we were working off reeeeally strong generalities here.)

Learning Perspective

Last night I got home from work, went jogging, showered, grocery shopped for a weekend getaway, wrote an entire song from scratch with guitar, cut a rough together for the guy I work on music with, and constructed a complete mock for the outside of our invitations. And then I got into bed, at midnight, feeling like I'd gotten nothing done.

Perspective is a tricky little bitch, and I feel like I'm just beginning to claw some out of myself. If I could find and keep perspective in my emotional toolbox, then maybe I'd be less critical of myself. And maybe you'd be less critical of you, too.

Your Everything.

Tonight Z and I sat down (or rather I stood, he sat) and I did my second attempt ever at voice recording.* Now, I record myself all the time. Z got me this cool little voice recorder, and I probably use it more than my laptop. But singing random lines while driving down the I-5 is a bit different than staring at a mic and feeling the squeeze of headphones against your head.

Walking into Dawn

(*Note: I wrote this a few days ago. If it disappears in a day or two, pay no mind.)

If you looked across any place I spend much time you'd find an anthropological study about my genetic line. The stacks of dishes, the groupings of coffee cups, the piles of clothes, the binder of environmental news clippings. That is a line that threads back through my genes, through my parent's and to my paternal grandparents. And so it is hard this week looking at the dishes, the cups, the clothing and the clippings to not think about the part of my family we lost last week.

This Plus That Actually Equals Zero

Two posts in one day, right?

I take notes during my weekly work meeting. After the meeting I type them up in a Google doc and send them off to people. I've set the privacy settings so that they don't even have to sign in to use. But after yesterday's meeting I get an email from my Mom. It reads:

"I can't make this work but for now it's okay."

I looked at the note for a few minutes trying to figure out why I was confused. Then I realized that the note didn't directly call for an action. If it was asking for help, it needed to ask for it. But she wasn't really asking for help. More like she was saying, "I might need help later." It was prepping me for a later help request.

Rules

Last night I got shit done. Today I'm walking into walls. I think lack of sleep may be the common denominator.