I meant to post this a ways back, but just realized I hain’t as yet.
MeFi pointed out Popspike.com, a searchable archive of ebay auction resluts for rare vinyl. My own rarities, “Songs Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles,” and a VJ promo EP are apparently fetching healthy amounts. I sould temper any excitement, however, as my copies are very, very beat-up.
About 2 hours ago, we struck for the night. We have two pickups to bang out in the morning – I’m guessing around 11 am – and the shoot will be over and we pack it up and head home to Seattle. I am very happy with the results – the shots look great, we got good sound, and our actors’ performances were all we could have hoped for.
I was initially skeptical about the project and agreed to participate because I am interested in learning about fast-and-light filmmaking. the practice of which I believe poses a significant threat to the revenue dominance of major film producers, much in the way that the proliferation of cable channels has challenged the predominance of the US Big Three networks.
I haven’t looked at the shots and schedule we were working from since sometime on Thursday, but as I recall, this ten-minute film used about twenty shots and a bit less than ten setups. Last I heard, we shot two full mini DV tapes, which I think gives us 180 minutes of footage; generally we were trying to get three takes of each shot.
Greg and Joey and I worked together very fluidly, and in some ways the best was the way we developed the lighting for the setups. I hope that the dailies look as good as I think they do at 6 am after being up all night.
Joey directs.
Megan reacts to a sudden noise upstairs.
Greg shoots.
Megan awakens with a start.
I’m spending the weekend out of town helping with a friend’s film shoot. The crew has taken over a good-sized house in the south Puget Sound area and tonight I am running sound on the shots, which mostly entails holding my arms above my head for a long long time. We’ve completed the first of three setups and one of seven shots. We started at 8 or so.
We project continuing to shoot straight through the weekend – the schedule tonight calls for us to work until about 4 am.
Viv and I finally took the walk to the sound through Carkeek Park from the shopping center that sits by one of the park entrances this morning, and we’ll be back. The highlight of the walk was a restored apple orchard by the trailside that had been planted by the Pipers, who originally homesteaded the area a bit over 100 years ago. It was a mix of incredibly old and beautiful fruit trees, gnarled and bent, and younger trees planted at the time of the orchard’s restoration in the late 1980s.
It’s quite rare to find a large orchard with such old trees – my grandfather, a fruit rancher, told me that trees are often pulled out at about twenty to forty years – and it was wonderful to wander around the slope, smelling the various heirloom varieties that were fruiting in great abundance in the summer sun. I came home with six; it would have been seven, but the incredibly ripe par I clambered up one senior citizen to pluck fell away as I jostled the branch that bore them.
Mmmm, beer: The Ultimate Beer Run in the Czech Republic [NYT].
You know, I’m out of beer!
Perusing the ever-expanding wonders of Musical Family Tree, I came across this amazing recording of the Zero Boys live at Ricky’s Canteena in 1983. Rat Rondell intros the band. I was there and boy was it a show. The band must have been right on the verge of recording Vicious Circle, I think. The sound on stage is nearly exactly the same as that on the influential record, also available for listening at MFT, it seems, in a live performance recorded in 2005.
I have a quickly populated playlist at MFT that includes a lot of records or recordings by people I am friends with. I have happy memories of listening to most of this material years ago and this site always amazes me with the depth of it’s archive. I mean, how incredible is it to idly jump on the internet and in three clicks of a mouse discover a recording of an all-ages hardcore punk-rock show recorded in 1983 and attended by about thirty people, one of which was me?
Say, that reminds me: Jon, where are you in your Vulgar Boatmen exploration?