School Week 2

I'm starting to wonder if scheduling an 8am shift at the library was such a good idea. In order to make it here on time I've got to leave my apartment (in Roger's Park, on the northern edge of the city) no later than 7am. Really, in order to have time to stop at Dunkin Donuts (which is just around the corner) to fuel up, I have to leave at about 6:45. For me that means waking up at 6 just barely gives me enough time to fly through a shower, shave, pack the bag, finish any last minute homework, and hop on a train. Then I sit for an hour.

We're starting to scout out locations for the diner. On Sunday Mike, Andrew (his director of photography) and I went to this diner near the White Sox's Cominskey Park. It was the closest thing I've seen to the diner I have imagined. Has the counter, and the kitchen divided by a high bar. The corner enterance was perfect, and the exterior (while not the single story trailer I had in mind) was gorgeous. The inside was not quite it. Too much wood, too many soft tones of browns and pinks. The diner both Mike and I imagine is far more sterile. Gritty. Colder bluer tones. And a little smaller. It has to look as though it could be run by only two guys, a waiter and a cook.

The diner, which appears in many forms, in many of my stories, is fairly similar to the highway one that Edmund stops at. And, here's the creepy part, the waitress we had was the exact waitress I had imagined in my mind at the diner along the highway. It was very creepy.

My friend/mentor, Mort Castle, just got an editors position over at Doorways Magazine, a horror and fantasy journal. They have a winter issue coming out, and are accepting submissions. I'm working on preparing a horror piece based around this constantly perplexing (and very Eastern European pagan) tidbit on a lesser known helper of Santa Claus.

The Krampus is a demonic like helper who comes along with Santa Claus to take care of the kids on the naughty list. According to Austrian tradition, instead of coal, the naughty kids get whipped and even carried away. Krampuses (plural) are depicted as the iconic devil, or sometimes shaggy. I'm going to do a slight take on it, mixing with another of Santa's less jovial helpers, Knecht Ruprecht, or Black Peter. It just seems so perfect for this horrific but very applicable take on the Santa Claus legend.

More moving today.

My dorm/apartment is looking very bare. All the walls are stripped down, leaving little yellow stains of sticky tack where once there were interesting posters. We're not allowed to nail into the walls, but that didn't stop my roommate who hung a world map which was old enough it still reffered to all of Eurasia, and all of Northern Asia as the USSR. I always found that really funny, just like the framed puzzle he hung up of an underwater scene. I also really disliked looking at that painting because there was a single piece missing from it, and every time I looked at it my eye would gravitate towards that one spot and fixate on it until I was annoyed.

The large boxes on wheels had somehow managed to disappear so it left Matt and I to load in boxes from my room armload by armload, riding the elevator up to the 25th floor and down again....over and over and over... Thankfully I didn't pack everything seeing as I am going to continue living in this dorm room for another week or so in order to finish out the semester and to avoid having to deal with a 40 minute commute to get to my 8 o'clocks on Monday and Tuesday.

Mike got his film back today and he was able to review it. If I hadn't been busy with moving stuff I would've hopped on it and checked it out. He said that, except for a few minor incongrueties that will get left on the cutting room floor, everything they shot was really very good, and this project is going to be a hit. That really gets me excited about the prospect of actually filming and seeing "Interlude" this coming winter.

We also have started kicking around the idea of doing a zombie movie, which we both swore we would never do, but have decided that it would just be plain old fun to go out and experiment with a hack n slash, blood and guts, action movie. I pitched him the idea that it would be interesting to see it done with a winter premise. He fell in love with the visual idea of seeing the blood splatter the snow. So now I am busy brainstorming a whole ton of the ideas that would make it interesting. I keep leaning towards noir titles, like "The Dead Months" or "The Long Dead Winter" or something of that sort.

Going to be back in town tomorrow. Should be interesting. Still wondering how I am going to get all this homework done by next Monday. I've given up on finding an artist, so I think I am going to just slap together a basic pitch, and turn it in on monday, maybe see if I can crank out the excuse that my "artist is going slow" and get a few more days to finish it up. I'm a bad bad person. Anyways it's late, and I've got a drive ahead of me, mostly doing homework while Matt cruises.

Preproduction Postproduction And Brain Damage

I spent this last weekend masquerading as a filmmaker again, sort of. I was (officially) the behind-the-scenes videographer for my friend's production "We The Infallable." Mike Lawrence, my director buddy, who is also attending Columbia College, had to shoot his production 1 final. Unlike most projects that I have been a part of, or have heard about, Mike has run an incredibly tight ship, and has reinvigorated my faith in the world of Filmmaking.

That's not to say that the shoot was anything short of exhausting. We had a 17 hour day on friday finishing up preproduction. This involved a lot of moving tables and furniture and props around, and a whole lot of not actually being a "behind-the-scenes videographer" and a lot more of being a gopher and a peon. Saturday and sunday was the official production days.

He had organized a full cast and a full crew to shoot this short short. Being able to work on a semi-professional set, even as the annoying kid with the videocamera asking questions and taking notes, was quite an experience. It made me realize a lot of what I was missing in my filmmaking experience at LCC. It also made me realize that I am extremely happy being a writer. Being a director is a scary thing. Too much work, too much coordinating, especially if your producer is only marginally producing.

The general gist of We The Infallable is that the Devil is throwing a dinner party, and has invited six guests to break bread and sup with him. An Oil Tycoon, a Priest, a Politician, a Lawyer, a Young Millionare, and a Pornographer. At the real Last Supper Jesus said to his followers that "one of you will betray me." In "We The Infallable" the devil says to each of his honored guests that "everyone here will betray you." It's done in a very Kabuki style. Everything is very archetypical and very exaggerated but not parodied.

Mike kept talking about how he is excited about rattling chains with this story, and about making all these interesting and angering points. It occured to me on Sunday that what he is actually doing here is more Christian and more of a parable than what he thinks. He's created a very quintessential scene with very archetypical characters that we can understand and that we define as evil or as sinful and detrimental to society, and he has painted a picture using stories that we can understand and symbols that we can understand in order to make a point. I thought that was pretty interesting.

On Friday I pitched him my concept for this short story involving my diner world called "Interlude." He fell in love with it, and has optioned it to shoot next winter. Now that we are done with "We The Infallable" we are already entering preproduction for "Interlude." It occured to me today that I've done more "real" film work now than I ever did as a film major. We're aiming to shoot next winter.

I sent him an email with a bunch of attachments, covering the Interlude, other stories that take place in the diner, and a 10 page walk through of the diner so that he can get a feel of my vision. He sent the pitch to a Producer he met through a Practicum Film this year, hoping that the producer could suggest a possible Director of Photography. The producer, upon hearing the concept, offered to produce the film for Mike. This is exciting because the Practicum is pretty big time stuff over at Columbia. So as of now it seems that we have a writer a director, and more than likely a producer attached to the project. I'm going to continue posting updates here as I adapt the short story to film, and then definitely when we enter deeper into preproduction and post production.

The semester is almost over. Thank God. It feels like my brain is almost ready to seep out of my left ear. Just a little more push to make to get these heavy hits of homework done and then it is summer, and I can focus on what I want to.