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« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
Tim Etheridge, publicist at the San Francisco Film Festival, met Someguy and me at the KCBS studios just in time to get on the mid-day show of anchor Rebecca Corral. News, sports, traffic update, a few words from our sponsors, and in between, 1000 Journals… Great fun. Here's a link to the interview.
Tim, and KCBS News Programming and Web Producer Connie Kim.
Rebecca flips through Journal 526.
Just as last week in Indianapolis, during the Q+A session after the Monday night screening in San Francisco, another "missing" journal came back to life. It felt like the film continued seamlessly, from the "send the journal on" end credits sequence on the screen, to live-action in the cinema.
Erin, the keeper of Journal 270, emailed this a few days later:
"I'm glad I could have sent #270 back on its way and the other night seemed the perfect opportunity. I actually received the journal from Someguy himself back in 2001. I had initially given it to a dance friend of mine, with the concept that it would stay in the dance community traveling to different workshops all around the world. But I guess that didn't pan out, and he gave it back to me. Then I gave it to a friend of mine (Eman, who is mentioned on the site), who had some grand artistic scheme for it which never came through. Quite a bit later I dated him for a while and when we broke up I took the journal with me. I ended up moving back in with my parents for a couple of months and journal #270 sat in a box over there for several years. There were times when I considered digging the journal out and passing it on but after so many other journals got so lost I was afraid to let #270 suffer the same fate.
I haven't seen Someguy for several years but I heard about the documentary and knew I wanted to see it, so it seemed like a good time to send #270 on.
I currently work with children and families in San Francisco inner city, it's a pretty troubled population and can be very discouraging at times. Before returning #270 I opened it up to have a last look at some of the things in there, and ran across the story and picture by Kahled, which is actually pretty precious to me. Kahled was one of the first youth I ever worked with when I was doing mostly creative writing tutoring in a middle school in the outer Richmond district of San Francisco. Even though the job was only part time back then and the pay was totally crappy and I had no benefits, that was the first time I fell completely in love with my job. Although I didn't know it then, that period of my life was really the starting point of what I now see as my lifelong "career." I think I had assigned him to write about me and my dog being superheroes as a way to keep him quiet while other kids worked on their homework. Looking back at that story all of a sudden brought back for me all this nostalgia for a time when I was young, maybe a little green and anxious to make a difference in the world. It reminded me of why I do what I do every day.
One of the hardest things about my job can be pouring your heart and soul into a young child, a teen or even a family, being there for them when they need you building a bond and then having to walk away when you take on a new position. Kahled (who introduced me to Ramadan) and so many other youth who have touched my life are no longer in it, and each of those goodbyes have been extremely difficult. But in the end, just like with the journals you have to trust the work you've done while that person was in your life and send them on their way.
We can't hold on tightly to everything that is precious to us, be it a journal, a person or project you've worked closely on or sometimes even someone you've loved. Letting go of things can be an act of faith (like I sure hope no one pastes over that story) and it can also be bittersweet, but clinging on to things prevents growth. And besides no one wants to be the crazy cat lady who collects everything!
That's my 2 cents."
Journal 270 was passed on that night to Anna Lis. She had interesting plans, but more on this as things develop. I'm hoping to receive the scans of Journal 270 to add them to this post…
A few minutes prior to our Monday night screening at the SFIFF, the Scoop du Jour team of the festival caught up with Someguy and me for an interview...
I've seen Errol Morris' SOP at the Berlinale -- check it out if you can.
A special treat and highlight of our time at the San Francisco International Film Festival was a visit at Jefferson High School in Daly City, organized by Joanne Parsont at the S.F. Film Society's program Schools at the Festival.
We spent a couple of hours with several classes of 9th graders, and their teacher Ericka Olson, who had seen 1000 Journals, and were asking Someguy and me a ton of questions. Then the real fun started: Someguy opened his box with journals and art supplies, and everyone had a go at it…
PS. A few weeks after the festival, I got an email from Paulina who wrote our visit inspired the students to start their own journal. She was hoping we could come back to see what they've done so far… Here's Paulina, adding a poem to Journal 526.
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.
It's wonderful to be back in San Francisco. The here and now is fantastic, coming "home" with the finished film to the fabulous SFIFF. Wherever I go, and around every corner from there, are memories: scenes we shot with Someguy, interview locations, looking for the perfect park bench, navigating the city, favorite restaurants, the many hotels we stayed in... Between January 2004 and July 2006, we came to San Francisco seven times, filming well over 20 hours of interview footage with Someguy alone, plus about twenty interviews with contributors to the journals and other people connected to the project or Someguy. In most of these memories is of course Ralph, and I'm sad he's missing the festival. He's crazy busy with work, but we are hoping his call sheet on Sunday has an opening so he can join Stuart and me in Newport Beach.
Our first screening here, at 1:30, was great fun, and packed, and this despite nearly 80 degrees and bright sunshine. Many people stayed to check out journals, and snapped pictures. Among them ADDA DADA, who posted great coverage on his Flickr page, and Curbsidetreasures. On the news scroll are updated links to pics, reviews and blog posts.
While I was on the early shift presenting 1000 Journals to The Inside Edge, Someguy traveled across the country to attend our screening in Indianapolis. He came back with an amazing story:
"The Indianapolis International Film Festival had a surprise in store for me... during the Q&A, a woman raised her hand and said "Um, I've got one of the journals. I've had it since 2001." The crowd buzzed with excitement and a man in the back raised his hand and asked "Can I have dibs on it?"
Journal 832 wasn't very full, but gauging from the excitement, I'm sure it'll get some love and care soon. Shannon had already promised it to two other people, and I'm trying to arrange to have everything scanned at high-res. It just goes to show that these journals, even if they've been in a packing box for years, can still continue their adventures and touch peoples lives."
Lain Ewing was there to shoot a video about Someguy's conversation with Shannon, the keeper of Journal 832. It's posted on YouTube. Lain also covered and posted the Q+A session.
For the hard working people who run the film festivals in San Francisco, Newport Beach, and Indianapolis, and for us filmmakers invited to these festivals, this is the weekend before the fun begins. Since Friday afternoon, when I shipped off the last box with screening masters and publicity materials, I hear a clock ticking away, loud and clear. Three days to go until I drive to UC Irvine, for the 6:30 AM presentation at The Inside Edge. Four days to go until Someguy leaves just as early to get to our screening of 1000 Journals, at the International Film Festival in Indianapolis. On Saturday, we'll meet at our first of four screenings at the San Francisco International Film festival. I'll leave S.F. for the day on Sunday, to attend our screening at the Newport Beach Film Festival. On Monday, Someguy and I will talk about the film at Jefferson High School in Daly City, and in the evening at 9:00 PM, we'll have our second S.F. screening... With an itinerary like this, we are so depending on airlines and airports operating on schedule, flights not grounded for safety checks, airlines not suddenly calling it quits... Something to better not worry about.
Enjoying the quiet before, I met with 1000 Journals contributor Sandra Steh yesterday for a bike ride along the beach. Sandra is visiting Los Angeles, from Munich, Germany, and as she is a very talented and energetic photographer, she did what she does best, making tons of contacts and working at various photo shoots around town. And now I'm back at the computer, filling in my iCal with dates and flight numbers... The next two weeks are going to be crazy and fun!
I love this photo by Sandra, and she must like it too: It's her Facebook profile picture, and it's the title image of her website.
Indeed, where is he now? Wrapping 1000 Journals did by no means end Director of Photography Ralph Kaechele's intense travel schedule, and he remains difficult to pin down. In a discussion about public transportation, Ralph once jokingly remarked, "I'm flying to work."
Andrea: Where have you been, and what did you do there?
Ralph: Oh gosh, where and when should I start? To not be boring, let's only talk about the last 4 months. I was in NYC to chill and spent New Year's, which was great, especially as I met LindA, Brad and Someguy as well while hanging out there.
On January 3rd I had to go back to L.A. to shoot a piece of a carreerbuilder.com commercial that actually made it into the Super Bowl broadcast. The commercial shoot was great fun. It was another collaboration with my wonderful friends of Screen Novelties, a Stop Motion Animation company around the corner from where I live. These guys keep the fantastic and so charming tradition of single frame stop motion animation alive while for some reason everybody else tries to do either hyper-realistic 3D animations on the computer, or spends millions and millions to alter some of the most beautiful human beings into completely sick, ugly and disgusting locking ancient Persian warriors.
After that, I went to Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Moorea, for a shoot which was great. 90 degrees in late January, and whenever I had a break from shooting I would be jumping into the ocean and snorkel. Unfortunately my surfboard couldn't be with me, it just wouldn't fit into my luggage.
A: Despite all the time spent on these projects, you also find time to promote the films you worked on. I was thrilled you came to Berlin to support the international premiere of 1000 Journals in the section Berlinale Special…
R: Those 6 or 7 days in Berlin have been just wonderful and insane at the same time. The screenings of 1000 Journals were amazing, the reactions more than satisfying, and especially for me it is always a bit of a coming home. To see and meet all my friends and buddies again is just great. And the parties -- my God, don't even get me started. I think I haven't slept much more than 14 hours during those 7 days.
A: Your wife Nic told me you're keeping a festival journal for 1000 Journals...
R: Well, if you call that collection of beer and drink taps a journal, yes! But seriously, no, I actually just plastered screening tickets, receipts and other fun things in and over my copy of the 1000 Journals Project book that I kept with me.
A: In what can only be described as the perfect and logical next step in your career, you started a production company, fusionfilms. What's in this name, and what has happened so far?
R: Well, an old friend and collaborator of mine approached me with a story that we thought would make a great documentary. It would have been my first time not only doing the camera work, but also directing a feature length documentary.
After prepping, investing in and founding a company for this purpose, it turned out that we couldn't get all the rights to the story at that moment. So the project is on hold, but the company is very much alive, because we have tons of ideas. As we've known and worked with each other for many, many years, it really felt like the most natural thing to finally fuse and form a company. So we went ahead and shot 2 commercials for luxury resorts in French Polynesia, since my business partner, Martin, has a book publishing background and tons of connections in this field. He usually produces around 30 books per year, you've seen them everywhere; nice coffee table books like "Cool Hotels," "Luxury Houses," or the really nice pocket size city travel guide called "and:guide."
Despite dedicating a lot of time towards the new company, I'm still shooting other productions as a D.P. In fact, I just finished another commercial including all kinds of tricks and animations. It's for the "HP - Hands" commercials series that you might have seen. These clips are with Michel Gondry, Vera Wang, Jerry Seinfeld and so on. Really cool and crazy stuff, especially Gondry's, I love his work, mashing all styles and techniques together is wonderful, and again, so much more charming than any perfectly rendered computer animation
A: How do you go about soliciting work? How much is on spec?
R: We were lucky that we didn't have to do anything on spec, but the budgets weren't the biggest in the world, so far. But last month we shot and produced a mood film for a huge corporation in the UK, so we are basically pitching a whole new film concept to them and if it gets green lit we will be busy for quite some time. And I can already foresee that it will include a huge amount of travel.
A: While you and I were on the road for many, many weeks, and getting sick and tired of fast and restaurant food, we often spoke about cooking, favorite dishes, and what we would really like to eat now. Your favorite specialty at the time was a Thai Papaya salad...
R: Oh yeah, that salad is great, especially on days like this when it is still 90 degrees at 6pm. I altered my version slightly from the version that you and I had in that Thai restaurant in Chicago. Or was it Toronto? It was freezing cold, I mean extremely freezing cold! Way too cold for the surfer dude I wish I would be.
Here is the rundown: slice a Papaya and a Mango and one green Bell Pepper in thin long pieces, mince a bunch of green onions and one small regular onion, chop a good amount of cilantro and squeeze the juice from 4 limes. You also need half a small spoon of those hot and dried red chili flakes. Start with the sauce: Lime juice, onions, chillies or pepper flakes, cilantro, pepper and salt. Add the rest, mix around and have it sit for an hour in the fridge. You can always add more lime juice. The Mango and Papaya need to soak up the lime juice and the flavors will start to blend. Bon Appetit !!!! I think I'm going to make one right now. See you Later!
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