In the heat of the O.C.

I stuffed my backpack with  journals, postcards, and camera, and took a cab to Oakland airport to get on the morning flight to Long Beach, some 20 miles south of Los Angeles. From the cool of the Bay Area to a heatwave in Southern California, triple digits! The Newport Beach Film Festival picked me up on the curb, and off we went to the Fashion Island Mall, where filmmakers and film fans mingle with shoppers. Ginny Laird, Senior Programmer and our "mum" at the Newport fest, gave me the warmest welcome and introduced me all around, and then brought me to the Edwards Island cinema, to meet our composer Stuart Balcomb. Outside, waiting in the sun, was a long line queuing up behind a 1000 Journals sign. These people were great: it took a while to get them all out of the heat into the theater, but they waited patiently. I ran into Adrian Windsor, the Program Director of The Inside Edge, and several people who were at our early morning session on Wednesday at UC Irvine. And ever so briefly I chatted with the director of Cubefreak, Erika Speed, and Sweet Mike of the Delray Beach Film Festival. When we were about to start the film, the projectionists alerted us about a slight HD tech glitch and asked if I had a backup Digibeta on me... I did! It's one of these moments that makes you sweat bullets. At this point in the life of our film, I still think I can control a few things, for example, the quality of the projection. From my perspective, the switch from HD to Digibeta feels huge. I tried to talk myself through and out of this -- so many people watch films on their computers, even on their iPods, and what counts is the story. We tweak all these frames (in our case, 29.97 frames per second of film) to make them look perfect, but then we have to learn to give it up and trust the whole thing works. This was a good lesson for me. 1000 Journals is growing up.

After the packed screening and a great Q+A session: Ginny Laird, and Paul and Naomi's Sundance friends,  Ernest and Dimetria, with Journal 878.

Photo call for Stuart and me.