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August 6, 2010

576 Takes and counting...

I am not a great extemporaneous speaker. I'm not a great speaker at all, or even a good one. And so the idea of doing my own commentary track for St. Nick was one whose value seemed outweighed from the onset by my own incapability to communicate in a comprehensible manner, much less an erudite one.

Nonetheless, at the last minute I decided to give it a shot. That last minute has now turned into three days, on and off, of me sitting in front of a microphone, trying to find a way to maintain some semblance of a working vocabulary and hitting record over, and over and over again. I'm moving forward bit by bit, one sentence at a time, until I've managed to utter something that might technically be considered a cohesive statement (I gave up on trying to be enlightening on the first day).

I've got about ten minutes of the film left to go. At this point the whole endeavor is stuck halfway between an endurance test and a practical joke, especially since I arbitrarily discovered that I can speak slightly better if I add an entirely artificial Texas twang to my diction. I'm fake!

I am compelled to do this, I know, by the same misguided idealism that thought - still thinks - I might someday make a good teacher. And I'll continue to picture myself as that dashing pontificate, ignoring the awkward part-time adjunct that stares back from that faint reflection in the window. I'm sure this is good for something.

Posted by David Lowery at August 6, 2010 1:43 AM