July 25, 200

I never did run out of space on my hard drives; I finished the movie with a good ten gigs or so left.

However, I do seem to have run out of RAM. I can't successfully play the movie straight through without it stopping once or twice on the way. This is so annoying.

This also means it won't finish rendering the last big block of letterboxed footage. Arrrghhh! Thankfully, the Fort Worth Film Festival has given me an extension on the deadline. Lucky me. So tommorrow, I'm off to Best Buy to grab some quick Random Access Memory, as well as the Sleepy Hollow DVD. I've been resisting its lures for too long...I must have it! Now!

I want to start writing so bad. I've got so many ideas swimming around inside my head, but I can't seem to put them down on paper. It is driving me crazy. I hate this kind of writer's block. I hate any kind of writers' block, but because I have this version of it right now I hate it the most. I've taken down the page about my most recent script attempt, just because there was no progression on it at all. For those of you who want to go there, just add a backslash and new2.html after the .com in our address in your browser, and it will pop up. I'm still a sucker for feedback.

July 24, 2000

Music really helps.

I forget sometimes that I haven't scored this movie. And while a really good movie doesn't always need a score, most movies do. And as I lay down temp tracks from other soundtracks, I realize how much better it sounds with music. I'm so glad we have so many good musicians working on this film. Without them, the temp track could end up being much better than the actual score. But these are just ideas to work from...mood setters, if you will...and the final score will be so much better.

Right now I'm rendering a letterboxed version of the film, for viewing on non-widescren TVs. It's taking a LOOONNNGGGG time...I think it might be done by the time I wake up in the morning. But it looks so good in widescreen! I love letterboxes...they make everything look ten times prettier.

All right, is anyone keeping count on how many times I end one of these entries with a complaint about how tired I am? I always am tired. I wish I could go through life asleep...zzzzzzzzzzzz....

So actually it's not all that bad. This movie is my creation; I think I'm permitted to let my morale plummet now and then. I may not be able to afford it, but I can forgive myself.

There are a few aspects that I really don't like, but they aren't going to stop me from finishing up the film. Since my last disparing entry, I've upgraded FCP, and now I can finally see the movie in widescreen. And it really does look beautiful, as I've said so many times before. Hopefully, it's pretty enough to make people not notice the bad stuff.

CDs to keep me inspired: Fiona Apple (XOXOXOXO), A Perfect Circle, any my latest acquisition, PJ Harvey's 'To Bring You My Love.'

I'm coming close to locking the picture and beginning work on the sound. A few little details need to be fixed. But I'm so tired; I've recently re-entered the nine to five world, and it's wreaking havoc on my sleeping schedule.

Speaking of which, I think I will go to sleep.

July 4, 2000

So I can't in good faith keep calling this movie beautiful. It looks beautiful, that much is true. But it isn't good. It's just a bad movie that looks really pretty and has some a few good parts. I don't think it's anything that can be fixed. I fucked up. It's not anyone else's fault.

So do I just bury this all now or what?

June 29, 2000

It's been a while since I've updated this page, mainly because I've had trouble uploading anything. The stupid CuteFTP Uploader only seems to work when it wants to. So anyway, I've deleted several of the past unl-uploaded entries and I'll merge them together here.

First of all, Happy Birthday to Christina Ince, who composed our beautiful music and who turned twenty on June 26. And a happy half birthday goes out to me on that same day.

Second...the first cut of the movie is done. Complete. Etc. A month late? Not too bad. Not too bad at all. It looks great. Now it's time to go in and do the nitty gritty stuff...polish everything, make it better than it already is. And then on to doing sound work. Tommorrow I'm heading out to Fort Worth to record the final version of the song, as well as some of the major sound effects (guitar feedback, strings snapping). Then we'll submit the rough cut to festivals -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The movie looks so beautiful. I watched the scene where James watches Billy take the pills while Tori Amos' 'Playboy Mommy' played in the background, and it made me cry. I've still got to call Chrysalis records about getting permission to put 'Spaceboy' in the credits, for the festival print...Doug said he would revoke his image from the entire film if that song wasn't in the credits, so I better not let him down...for my sake.

I've added a new piece on editing to the articles page. Never seen this page? That's because I just added it. Most of the stuff has been seen before, but now it's archived for your reading conveniance.

And that's it for now. I'm going to go back to sleep. The main page will be updated tommorrow...hopefully, with music...so stay tuned...

June 14

All I managed to do yesterday was the fight scene between James and Adam; a minute and a half with more cuts than any other minute and half in the whole film. This was one of the scenes I'd done for practice before (along with the entire last tweny minutes), and it turned out pretty well the first time. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to cut it that well again, but I did, and I did it a lot better. This was the one scene that we just went crazy on; we had no specific blocking, the dialogue was semi-scripted, semi-improvised; every take was different, and we just kept doing it over and over, differently each time, until the battery died on the camera. Which gave us a lot of great footage but created problems with continuity. I made it through on top, but there's still one line that I want to get in and I don't think I'll be able to; why do all of the accidents (microphone going into the frame, cameraman's shadow, complete change of an actor's trajectory across the set, etc.) happen at the same point on each take? It's maddening. I'll keep working on it.

So this diary thing is pretty boring, I think. Not much to tell. But I'll keep doing it anyway, in case there's ever a big book deal about making the movie and they need the cliched 'director's diary' to put in it. I wonder how many of those books are real diaries and how many are made up from memory for the purpose of publishing?

The Super 8 film is back from the lab! I know it turned out because I looked at the first few shots frame by frame. Yay! Now to just find a projector....

June 10

Tonight we showed the first fifty minutes to an audience for the first time; an audience of one, but an audience nontheless, and one who had not an inkling of what the movie was about or how it was made. And he liked it, thank god. It's hard to love a movie without an ending and with a lot of stuff in the middle missing, but he liked it and followed it and didn't think it was bad. I am so happy.

The scene where the guitar goes crazy is really good. I used a lot of slow-mo for the first time; the two shots where Doug looks at Rob as Rob fades into the shadows....its so haunting. The actual feedback sequence is a little long...it's about fifteen seconds, and I think it should ultimately be more like five...but even without the sound effects, its pretty powerful. I am proud of myself, too; I didn't go too far with the one frame subliminal inserts! Just one.

But last night's cutting session wreaked havoc on my sleep heavy schedule of late, and I am now wide eyed and wired and about to drop at any moment. So I think I will. Drop, that is.

June 9

So I've been watching 'Natural Born Killers' and 'Fight Club' (which I never wanted to see again but was such a cool DVD that I couldn't resist), and I keep wanting to imbue 'Lullaby' with jump cuts and little strange touches. I think it would be better, though, if I stayed away from those contrivances. Carl has almost figured out how to do a whirlpool effect on an individual face (something that you technically shouldn't be able to do with FCP, I think). I don't know if it is appropriate for anything, but it looks pretty cool. Carl is pretty much in charge of any invigorating techniques to liven things up. Sometimes they look good, sometimes they don't, but he definitely brings a sense of freshness when it is needed. Like the scene where Rob freaks out in the car...now he grabs the cigarettes. shakes them, goes through some strange split second convulsion, and shakes the cigarettes again, while the soundtrack begins to play backwards. It's a little bit more complex than it sounds, and it look and sounds really bizarre...the kind of thing that goes by too fast to register at first, but ends up being kinda disturbing.

The movie is three seconds shy of forty five minutes. After tonight I will have reached the scene that leads up to the last twenty minutes that I had previously edited. Plus I still have to put in the super 8 flashbacks, which are still not back from the lab, titles, and there's an entire chunk in the middle that is kind of the axis of the entire movie that I haven't put in because we don't have the song recorded yet (no, I didn't get it done the other day). So that puts the movie at about...oh, an hour and fifteen minutes. Pretty good. I'm actually cutting a lot of stuff...scene 97 came close to stopping the movie dead. I've spent the last two days working on that, getting frustrated and having to stop and then going back to it. It's lost about 30% of its dialogue and works really well now.

It's time to start working on the score...and although I would love an orchestral score, I think I'm going to go for something more akin to Shudder To Think's score for 'High Art.' I keep getting letters from budding composers willing to do the score with an orchestra and everything...but I just don't have the money! Damn it. I'm so lucky I know so many musicians.

And I've had an itch to make an animated sequence for the film...I don't know where it would go or what it would be like or why I would want to do it at all. I remember when I first wrote the script, I thought it would be interesting to do it as a really strange stop-motion animation film. God, that would have been weird.

It is 5:12 AM, and I'm finishing up the first all nighter--I've been at it pretty much since 5 o'clock this afternoon (although Carl did take over for a little while, and we made a brief caffeine run to Denny's around twelve). Before tonight, the curse of nonlinear editing hadn't struck me; I knew what I wanted, I didn't trouble myself with options...but tonight that ended. I see all of these beautiful shots and I want to put them all in. Each one is a little work of art that so many people invested so much time in. So many babies are being killed....

And tonight is the first night I almost wept as I watched a scene. I'm getting closer to the heart of the movie...I'm seeing scenes I haven't looked at since I saw them through the viewfinder as they were shot. That is why I am still going. There is so much emotion in what is going on in the story, I feel that if I stop it will be severed in two. I don't know how much more I can accomplish though, before my eyes grow too heavy to see what needs to be seen. Two cups of coffee, two diet cokes, and an Italian espresso shot...I should be able to keep going. I'm going to try...

Tommorrow I want to progress on that song for the one scene we haven't shot...I think I finally have the lyrics, and Doug has the music...maybe we can put two and two together. And for that, I think I will conserve me mental energy. I'll sleep.

June 3

Updating this page is like a little brief reprieve from the precise insanity of editing...which is why I do it so frequently. Right now, Carl is sitting behind me, editing scene 48. A very emotionally raw scene. Rather uncomfortable. I'm glade he's dealing with it.

Scene 38, where James and Alicia are in the car, turned out so beautifully...I think it is my favorite scene so far. I happend to be playing the 'Magnolia' score when I did it...and track seven coincides SO perfectly with the scene. I hate it when that happens! Now we've got to come up with something as good as that...and I don't know anyone who is as accomplished a musician as Jon Brion.

Oh well. I wish I could actually find the inspiration to write something other than 'editing log' entries. My latest screenplay is ready to be finished, but I'm not ready to finish it.

June 2

Twenty five minutes are completed now. The sound in the dinner scene is really spotty...you can tell we had the microphone at different places for each angle. It'll be tough to ADR, so I hope there's some other way to fix it. But other than that, it looks great. And the scene following that, with the music in the living room, is fantastic (although the music will DEFINITELY have to be redone).

I'm about to do the conversation between James and Alicia in the car...this is one of the scenes I practiced one earlier, so I know it works. I'm going to try to add a slightly more surreal touch to it this time...

And the problem with editing scenes where people are eating is that it makes you hungry.

June 1

I was at first beginning to worry that this movie would be a lot shorter than I needed it to be. If it's seventy minutes or over, it's a feature, if it's sixty or under, it's a short. What if it's between sixty and seventy? I had this feeling that 'Lullaby' would fall squarely into that limbo. But I don't think so anymore. It's lengthening itself out nicely...I just pray that doesn't mean it's boring. I really need to show this to an unobjective audience...

Today the big dinner scene will fall beneath my digital blade...a somewhat important scene. It's one of the scenes that we filmed on the very first day and then reshot later. Thank god we did (although the cast will never eat spaghetti again, after the numerous takes). Stylistically, we ripped of the dinner scene in 'Buffalo 66,' which was difficult without a wide angle lens.

A funny anecdote...I was editing a different, shorter dinner scene yesterday (scene 27 to be exact), where the father and mother are eating soup. The soup was actually Dr. A+ soda, a cheap store-brand rip off of Dr. Pepper. It's just funny, watching the actors blow on soup and sip it like it was hot...I remember someone mentioning that it looked like carbonated pea soup, after which Carl dropped a bunch of green skittles into the bowls between takes. It looked really gross. There are a lot of great food stories from the set, actually...I'll have to tell some more of them later.

But first I have to go cut the CD store scene...which features Adam's fifth faceless cameo in less than twenty minutes. He'll have one more before the film is over...not since 'The Nutty Professor' has an actor stretched his versatility to such extents.

I'm tired...it's only been June 1st for about thirty minutes. The film was originally supposed to be done today. Ha. I want to sleep, and 'The Insider' soundtrack isn't helping...but I think I will try, try to finish one more little scene before I slide away into the mist...

Goodnight...or good morning...whatever.

May 31

Scene 21 turned out quite well; it was the scene with James and Adam in the restaurant. We got up at 5AM to film that scene, after having a really long, draining shoot the night before. So everyone was a bit spaced out, and there was some trouble remembering lines, and I dreaded editing the scene because I had this sense that it was just a little...lifeless.

It isn't, however. It's the longest single scene in the movie so far (about three minutes), but it is tight and flows really well. A testament to the illusion of montage, I guess.

Ever since we started filming, a strange phenomenon has occurred. Either puposefully or accidentally, every slightly funny scene or line of dialogue has been removed. This movie is shaping up to be slightly depressing. However, scene 21 is intact, slightly funny lines and all. Scene 14, however, was not so lucky. It's a lot more depressing than it originally was.

The super 8 film is being shipped back to me this week; I hope it turns out. The stock is pre-1975, and I was told by the lab that there was a 10% chance that it won't turn out. I don't know what we'll do if that's the case. Reshoot the scenes, I guess. We wanted old stock to give the footage a REALLY old look; maybe we were shooting a little bit too far.

Oh well. I wonder how many people have found this page yet.

May 28

I just finished scene 18 (I know these numbers mean nothing to anyone without a complete script), and noticed something I hadn't before; the image that we saw through the XL-1's viewfinder or monitor while filming was slightly cropped; on the computer, everything has a little bit more space on the edges. This usually means you see a little bit more of a room or a character's trajectory on a given path is a bit longer, but in scene 18...well, in scene 18, I discovered that the one good take of the Father leaving the room has someone walking by in the background. Which makes the take useless. Which creates an interesting dilemma.

So when you shoot your OWN movie with an XL-1, make sure you compensate for what you don't see.

Anyway, the movie is about twelve minutes long now. I've been editing a few scenes a day and then capturing the footage for whatever I plan to edit the next day. I need to pick up the pace...12 minutes in five days? That means it will take about a month to finish the thing...and I want to be done with the cut in less than a month, so we can start the sound editing.

But it looks pretty good. So that's good.

May 25

I cut scene 12--the last scene we shot, where James and Caleb are rocking out in their garage. It turned out great, really energetic, although we'll have to rerecord the riff they're playing. I can already tell we'll need a little bit of ADR work on some scenes, here and there.

Scene 13 wasn't a little trickier, a back-and-forth scene between just two set-ups; I'm worried about all these dialogue scenes, and whether or not they will be able to hold the audience's attention.

Watching all this footage again as I look for stuff to capture is fun; there are so many bloopers I forgot about. I just realized today that I am not keeping an actual edit log; I hope I don't need to reedit some of this stuff. I think I better start doing that, just for safety.

May 23

Today I began the first cut of the film. Previous to today, I'd edited various scenes, including the last twenty minutes of the movie, just to get practice and to get a feel of what the movie would look like. Today I dumped all that and began at the beginnin.

I originally had planned to capture all of the footage and then edit; I've since discarded that plan. Because of my limited amount of memory, I capture what I need as I need it. I'm already afraid that the seventy gigs won't cover the whole project. I'm applying for the 2000 Texas Filmmaker's Fund grant, and I think I'll ask for some money to buy another hard drive. I may just need it.

So far I've made it up to scene 8...but all of the flashbacks up to there are missing; we shot the flashbacks on an ancient Super 8 stock, which had to be sent off to Colorodo for developing, and won't be back from the labs for another two weeks. Overall, though, it looks really good. I played The Smashing Pumpkin's 'Spaceboy' over the footage and found it to be quite sad (which is good).