After a furious rush of enthusiasm and creative energy at finally deciding to go for it in making movies, I've slowed down. A lot. The enthusiasm is still there, but life has a way of putting the brakes on for me. For one thing, my body occasionally insists that I actually sleep. Most days I get four hours or so of sleep. Yesterday I hit the wall and slept for about eleven hours. So not much got done. On the bright side I feel pretty energetic again.
Since deciding I needed to lose weight, I immediately curbed my intake to around 2000 calories a day and started trying to walk around more. I dropped a couple pounds in the first week of this. Only about 50 more to go. I'd like to get down to around 170 pounds. At this rate it will take about six months. Maybe a year. Ugh. It beats feeling huge though.
On the projects front, progress is very slow. I'm working on two different things right now. One is the short film, which I'm for now calling "Customers." I bought a new microphone to get better sound than the crappy one on my camera. The first test was my about to be one year old son pushing a toy van around the living room and making "brmmm brmmm" sorts of noises. I also read off a couple lines from the script. Sounds good. Far better than I had before. I've been taking a lot of test shots around the store, trying to find the best angles and searching for a way to shoot the store that minimizes the riot of color from the products on the shelves. I may have to desaturate it in the editing process. I still don't have a solution yet. I'm still writing the script for this one so I have some time yet. One shot in mind requires the trees to have leaves on them so shooting won't start until we're a bit further into the spring.
The other project is a feature length script currently titled "Redshift." I'm not sure if I really like that title but it beats the previous title of "She Hates the Idea." I called it that for several weeks after I described the idea to my wife who made a face like I just served up haggis for dinner. Despite that less than enthusiastic response from her, I have high hopes for the script. I'm seriously thinking of shooting it myself, so a big part of the writing is keeping the visuals and locations within my reach. For instance, the main setting would be my cellar. I keep having to resist the urge to open the story up a bit. I don't expect to have much of a budget, so there's no point in writing in things I won't be able to afford doing.
So that's where things stand now. I'm not going to promise to write about this daily as some days all I have to say is that I stared at my screen waiting for good ideas to pour forth but they didn't. Not really that exciting. I was watching the production diaries on the King Kong DVD this afternoon and thought maybe I should do something like that too. But on second thought it sounds ridiculously self-indulgent considering I'm shooting a low budget short film.
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