July 15, 2004
I finished the video at 1:30 AM Monday night (or Tuesday morning, I guess), made a brief appearance at a party while the DVD files were encoding, returned home and had a copy burned by 3:30, dropped it off at the 24 hour post office at 4:00, and an hour later set off with my brother and sister for a camping trip, which I've just now returned from and which will likely be my last until this triple digit weather subsides. Curtis was going to meet up with us, but had loaned his truck out for cemetary-groundskeeping purposes and couldn't make it out.
So anyway, I finished this thing in five days (aside from the eight seconds, eventually cut down to four, that I started off with) with a price tag of $5.95. I'll post it online after the contest is over at the end of the month; I'll save any exciting production details until then, so that they'll make sense. I don't think it will win, but that's just because I'm pessimistic that way and I'm sure there's some idiosyncratic rule that I didn't completely follow or something. All that really matters is that I'm very very happy with it, in the same way I'm happy with Looking For Love: it turned out exactly how I envisioned it (vastly moreso, actually, thanks to my wonderful collaborators, who eventually also included Mateo Zeske and Ben Lowery). I do wish we had been able to shoot portions of it on film, but when has that ever not been an issue?
Yen and I met up with Kat Candler this past weekend -- she was in Dallas for a screening of her Slamdance short and PBS commissioned-short at the Dallas Video Festival. She brought her two producing partners with her, and the four of us ended up sitting at the Cosmic Cafe for over two hours, talking nonstop about filmmaking, even after we were all out in the parking lot, standing around instead of going to our cars. It was a lot of fun, and felt really benficial, like we all had very worthwhile things to share.
I talked to Mae for a long time the next night and she made me feel better about not moving out to LA, which I was thinking about doing this summer. She painted a picture of a creative environment where joy is in short supply, where making a music video as good as this one for 5.95 would have been a heck of a lot harder. And where I'd certainly have to get a day job sooner rather than later.
Posted by David Lowery at July 15, 2004 1:54 AM