Surgical Words

Of the few people I miss, I miss Elspeth the most.

Weird.

I was going to post every day of my vacation, and, uh, this is the second post. Pff.

But I have my excuse: I’ve been doing various things with my sister. Watching as much of the Artisan collection we can find at the movie store, anything by Darren Aronofsky, and pretty much anything indie or low-budget. And we haven’t been disappointed yet.

And in response to all of these, we’ve been writing our own student film — and it’s turning out to be pretty cool. Short, but cool. I’ll post the script when I get it typed (it’s scrawled in a memo pad and in various stages of completion.) Dialogue is hard to write without making it sound choppy and forced. Maybe we need a descriptory language so people can ad-lib on set and make something a bit more natural. We already shot the opening credits sequence, which turned out really cool, save for the fact that I really wish I’d shot one take as cinema verité handheld. Oh well. It still looks nice and is timed perfectly in terms of the music. We had enough takes that I could do fast cuts, which look very cool. I’m thinking about a stylistic framerate drop, maybe 20fps, but I’ll see what I like. The only problem we had was lighting — I used my halogen lamp with a blue gel over it, and then my camcorder light. My LCD monitor wasn’t calibrated, so what-I-saw was not quite what-I-got. But by the time it got to MPEG, everything had evened out and it looked spiffy and grungy.

Ack, we only have three days or so to shoot the rest of this movie. Eek.

Man: “But, Bono, why do you wear these sunglasses inside? Is it too bright?”
Bono: “Oh, man, you mean my shades? Aww, dude, no, it’s fine in here.”
Man: “Are you blind? Crosseyed? Are you hiding from someone?”
Bono: “Naww, duuude.”
Guitarist: “Are you a California Raisin?”