April 29, 2002
3:44pm Monday

THE TICK-TOCK OF THE CLOCK IS PAINFUL

So. Tired. Guess what I did yesterday. Guess! Do you think it involves relaxing by the pool with a sloe-gin fizz? It doesn't. Do you think it has to do with chopping up concrete and shooting DV and sweating like a maniac? It does indeed.

I have a friend who's doing a spec garden show, which is a little twist on what seems to be the norm around here of shooting shorts or DV features or just writing specs. But she has this hip, kooky garden show vision and so she got a bunch of people together and cooked us a barbequed lunch and we shot it yesterday. And man, it feels good to be shooting. We did it on an XL1-s which I've been wanting to use forever, and the big things I have to say about it are: a) the image quality's rad, but b) the follow-focus sucks and c) it's awkward as hell to hand-hold for any length of time. Canon promised they'd fixed the focus problem in this model (it was a well-known and serious screwup in the XL1) and maybe ours was particularly bad because it's a rental and it gets used and abused seven days a week, but still it was a huge drag.

We had a professional DP for part of the shoot, meaning we had a girl who went through AFI who has shot at least one 45-minute DV short/feature (I don't know what it technically is at that length. Long-short.) and we were outside the front of my house getting ready to shoot some flower footage for titles in the one place where flowers grow, and she'd never met me before and she goes, "Does anybody live here?" I said, "Yeah, that'd be me." Because our jank-fest house is so superghetto she thought it was abandoned. Apparently AFI churns them out cocky because she didn't miss a beat.

Gray and I want to buy an XL1-s desperately, and have seriously like five spec commercials boarded, two shorts written, and a genius idea for a childrens show. Plus go ahead and lump me in with all the kids who're planning to shoot DV features ­ I've got an almost-completed script for one of those, too. It's such a drag not having just the couple thousand bucks it would take to do some awesome stuff.

The tick-tock of today has been chewed apart by achy lethargy and the car dealership, where my stupid vehicle is being outfitted with new rear brakes. They also say, mysteriously, that it requires a new battery, when I've had no trouble with anything battery-related whatsoever. They also, oddly, want $200 for said battery and its installation, when I know for a fact it's half that at smaller chain mechanics. If you want to be rich, open a car dealership with a service center and fill it with mechanics who would pass the government questionable-ethics test that lets people become covert rogue snipers.

I saw Ghost World. Didn't think it was all it was cracked up to be, which was majorly disappointing. I should've seen it in the theater before everyone I know said, "It's the greatest! It's brilliant! It's my favorite movie ever!" I always give in to the hype, every time, even though I try to guard against it. Same damn thing happened with Rushmore.

Today's musical suggestion: DJ Shadow, "The 6-Day War."