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September 16, 2008

Hop Skip Burn Jump

This is a picture of me photographing Kevin Bewersdorf photographing me on the set of Bryan Poyser's new short film, The Crane House in San Antonio. It was a very fun, very sweltering production. I was serving as cinematographer, and I'm happy to say that the sunlight, though brutal in temperature, was kind enough to hold my hand and walk me through the shoot and make me look like I really knew what I was doing.

We wrapped at sundown this past Friday and drove back to Austin. I woke up at five the next morning and went for a run around Town Lake. I decided to push for ten miles and, sure enough, I made it the entire distance. This satisfaction was shortlived: my body decided that it wanted me to stop, on all fronts, and left the backdoor open for some flu germs that overtook me before I'd even gotten out of the shower. I spent the rest of the day wracked with fever and stomach pain, drifting in and out of intense delirium and having those awful deathbed dreams that run short and repeat themselves ad inifinitum. At one point I stumbled into the bathroom, looking for something - anything!- to alleviate the pain, and found some Aleve. I have an annoyingly stoic tendency to sweat things out, but desperate times call for over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, even ones who's labels loudly proclaim that they 'May Cause Stomach Bleeding.'

Twelve hours later and I was walking through the airport, trying to stomp on the viral surges that still threatened my equilibrium, reading about David Foster Wallace's death and looking for whatever gate my flight had been moved to. And less than twelve hours from that point I was back in Brooklyn with Joe and company, holding a boom microphone as we shot a few extra scenes for the new feature film that we'd wrapped for the first time exactly four months prior. We finished that up at midnight and spent the next few hours winding down at a bar.

Now I'm technically in the midst of IFP's Independent Film Week. I don't really feel like I'm here, though. I need to climb out of my head.

Posted by David Lowery at September 16, 2008 11:46 PM