Wednesday, September 01, 2010

The professor's cap

Usually I don't switch to Teaching Mode until after Labor Day but I'm adding a new book to supplement mine this year, so I need more prep time -- so today I'll start preparing my fall class. I also shoot today and tomorrow, important scenes ... well, they all are important or they don't belong! I am beginning to see little holes in the story I need to fill. Nothing major. Easy fixes, ten seconds here, fifteen there.

If  I can pull off the wake itself, I think I'll have a film. The wake needs to be, in  practice, organized chaos. I'm working on it.

Practiced a little banjo last night. Long time. I don't know why it's so easy to practice when I'm in class and so difficult when I'm not. Well, yes I do. I am spread too thin. I'm too damn busy. And this feature, of course, is all consuming, it's on my mind at all times. I decided I'd put some banjo playing in  the film, incentive to practice!

It's wet and chilly outside. I feel like I've been cheated out of summer. 

Harriet is gone for a week at the end of the month, visiting grandkids back east. I'll try to schedule a bunch of shooting then but don't think I'll hold the wake here without her help on camera and in preparations. I may change my mind ... we'll see how the first half of the month goes with shooting.

I'm even toying with a device I used in my play The Half-Life Conspiracy, a play within a play within a play. In this case, film within a film within a film. The film within a film is already set up, I may have the narrator, yours truly, get interested in making his own film (as opposed to shooting for his brother's film), layering the lenses through which reality appears. May also be too much of a distraction. The ending is the key, and I may not know what I need until I film and see the ending, the scene between the two brothers, their bonding of a sort.

I am close, though, to shooting everything up to the wake. Then I will shoot the ending, I think, and save the wake itself to the last thing I do.

This is like juggling with 100 balls in the air.

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