How quickly this impromptu film class has gone from a simple mercenary affair– an opportunity to usurp as best I could the loaned 16 mm camera and use my classmates as a built-in crew–to a careening disaster-in-waiting. Which I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about except, I offered my script to be filmed. Or should I say to be enthusiastically destroyed, not filmed. Filming would require some forethought. And I have to cooperate because, it is a class, people paid money–very little money, I might add–and any dictatorial declarations from me would have little weight. But, in the end, they may come involuntarily.
Well, things haven’t gone too wrong yet.But how could they not, when the teacher hasn’t ever touched a 16 mm camera and has yet to even tell us what we are actually going to be doing–except filming on the last day of class with a camera none of us has ever touched. A bunch of neophytes who have no idea what they are getting into.In the meantime, everyone is making up roles for themselves–wardrobe, casting, etc.–playing Hollywood. My God. DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO USE A CAMERA? HOW TO SET-UP A SHOT? HOW TO LIGHT A SCENE?
We should be worrying less about hats and more about the practical, difficult aspects of filming. Screw hats.
My script, the little sacrificial lamb. Argh. Not that it is Casablanca, by any means, but it is mine, and I don’t like the fucking hat. And we don’t have time to look at head shots. And, no, that line does not need to be changed.
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I am buried in work, and am more stressed than I have been in a long time. I am having crazy dreams, and I wake up exhausted, as if I have been doing algebra in my sleep. Solving theorems. Puzzling over conundrums. I drag my ass into a dirty pair of jeans and head to work, where my colleague and I have just begun teaching a new 10-week curriculum. It is all maddening. I will end up a jabbering idiot if this doesn’t stop.
Re: knock knock
Cool with me. And thanks. I have done likewise.
Strange. I lived in Portland for about 5 years before high-tailing it back to RVA. How is it being a Southern girl out in the rainy NW? People were disappointed I didn’t have more of an accent. They just weren’t listening. They were expecting Gomer Pyle, I suppose.
Precisely ditto. If i might not have had an accent for most of my younger years, i do have a bit of one–sometimes–now. Nobody at my workplace hears it, even when i lay it on a little thicker to see if they’ll notice.
Being a Southern girl here…well, has me anxious for the hot sunny summer (“it’s mid-May, for god’s sake!”). And it heavily strains the tension i already knew between being home and being elsewhere. It seems to me that i consider this a lot in my journal, but perhaps i only think and talk often about it.
What did you do in Portland? And what is your business in Richmond, if you don’t mind my curiosity?