docublog

Goose Bumps

It's the third day with Joshua, and the first mini-stories begin to come together. I cannot describe (yet) how exciting this is for me. It's like having goose bumps all over the brain, or something. I hear my heartbeat. I've been playing this film in my head since I started to work on it. But it was just in my head. Now the film is slowly emerging in a medium that can be shared. I'm so thrilled, excited, nervous, happy… As we can work along my script, Josh doesn't have to first screen all of the footage. We can jump right into the juicy stuff, interconnected stories we filmed over the course of a year, on several continents.

Joshua

Tomorrow is the first workday for our latest team member: Joshua Callaghan, Editor. Very 1000 Journals, his academic background is cultural anthropology and fine arts, and he's lived in Brazil and Nepal. Joshua has been working in the film biz since 1993, the last two feature length films he edited were documentaries. Check out his C.V., and a few of the clips he's put on his website. I especially like Self-Titled Debut, and his various art installations.

I spent the last two weeks preparing footage, callsheets, shotlists, on-location notes, the script, scans, and other flotsam and jetsam into one comprehensive, cross-referenced system for collaborative use off- and online. Beginning with A-Roll tape 0001, which we filmed at an art exhibition of my friend Gudrun at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, CA, on April 30, 2005, and the MiniDV footage I filmed in the days before Ralph, in March 2004, in San Francisco, and ending with A-Roll tape 0122, the Manchester and Bolton, UK, footage of last month. I forced myself away from this work and onto my bike just a few times. It's been just too huge a mountain to climb, and once on the way, it was way too interesting to not work on it day and night. We have some really great stories to tell. And I hope we'll tell them well. I'm nervous, and I feel the pressure of a lot of responsibility. We will have to take so many decisions as we're shaping this film…

No media

Julie, whom we interviewed in March in NYC and Bayside, NY, sent me an email saying she'll sign off from the web, the TV, even the paper, for two weeks, on a media boycott organized by PledgeBank.  She wrote: "This means no online journal, no flickr picture posts, no web surfing, no personal emails..." Just imagine! We emailed back and forth on her last day of e-connectedness, and she promised to keep an off-line diary of this experiment. I took a mental note to send snail mail her way. Julie will emerge on July 4th, and I can't wait for her detox story.

Ballona Creek

Hopping on my bike does really clear my mind, especially now that I have discovered a bike path along the L.A. River, which I can take all the way to the ocean. Here're some pictures, going from East (the East edge of Culver City) to West (South Marina del Rey).

This guy, Jaime, stopped when he saw me taking pictures, stripped, and asked me to photograph him while he showed off some boxing moves.

More interviews

A week of interviewing editors without camera, microphones, and without doing the PSA (you know what I mean…). Thanks to friends and colleagues, the Doculink community, and an ad on Craigslist, I sifted through nearly 150 applications, saw about 100 reels, and finally met a dozen truly talented cutters. One of them caught my attention from the first line of his cover letter, and him I met twice. This is a big decision for me. Not only because editing is a big job on the film, as we will have about 150 hours of footage when all is said and done, and want to arrive at a 90 to 100 minutes long movie. It will take 16 to 20 weeks of close, intense collaboration, it will take trust, and great communication skills, to pull through this long stretch of time, and be inspired by each other and the material, every day. The editor I met twice already will meet with me one more time next week. If all checks out, we will begin this leg of the journey as soon as he's off the film he's working on right now.