New Family Member!!! :D

Tommy's 3-year-old daughter, Amber -- who starred in our 48-hour Bloodshots film festival entry -- has a baby sister as of 5:30 pm yesterday!!!

I couldn't be more happy for my friend and collaborator!!! :D

Tommy and his wife have already done such an AMAZING job with their first daughter!!! I can't wait to see how their second child turns out!

I'm sure this will fade a bit once I start hearing stories about midnight feedings, but it make me wish I were playing Daddy again! Children are AWESOME!!!

If you pay attention, each and every one of them comes with their own personality. Right out of the womb, they're PEOPLE! And you can make all the plans in the world about how they will behave and who they will become before they're born, but once they're out of the shoot (sorry for the unfortunate mental imagery there) they do things their way, lol!

(My poor mom... The son she wished she'd had... lol.)

It's so astounding to watch as that personality unfolds and develops right before your eyes!!! Twice I've gotten to re-experience things for the first time, through the eyes of a tiny human I was helping to raise!

You want to experience you favorite movie for the first time again? Watch it with someone 20 years or more younger than you! No 2 people see the same movie, but a tiny human DEFINITELY sees a different movie than you're seeing!

...I wonder if Tisha has seen RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK...

DUDE! When Gnomey and I hook up... We're gonna make some AMAZING tiny humans!!! I'm hoping they have my curiosity and her wicked sense of humor and accent! I'd also like them to have my sense of wonder about the spiritual, but her fearlessness. And definitely her creativity! I have skill at being creative, but Gnomey's creativity is much free-er and more boundless!

I miss Wendy. :( I haven't heard from her for a couple of days because she's ill and she's healing. I wish I were there to fetch things for her and coo at her and just generally be comforting and affectionate and stuff!

Okay, I'm gettin' girly now, so I'll stop.


Um...

FOOTBALL!

BEER!

BOOBS!


There. That should butch me up a bit, hehe. ;P

I had a ridiculously positive day today!

It started when I woke up early to go to the bank and withdraw rent, and the guy who took care of me glanced over my account and found all sorts of way to make my finances easier on me! How often does THAT happen? (Usually, everyone who doesn't know me is trying to make my finances more difficult!)

Then work seemed to sort of do itself for me! the exhausting piles of paperwork (well, computer work, really) that accompany Friday nights for me just sort of breezed by, wrapping up an hour or 2 earlier than usual lately.

Then the tape work I do around 3:00 am on FriSats seemed to be completed not long after it was begun.

I even had time to watch the 1-hour Season Premieres of THE OFFICE and MY NAME IS EARL during my shift!

Ice that cake with the email announcing Tommy's daughte's birth, and you've got a pretty groovin' day for Ray Jay! :)

OH WAIT!!! lol Start that day with a call from Tisha!!! :D She called me from school! She was in Theatre class (cool enough all by itself, hehe) where she was surfin' old entries in my blog and spotted an error! I said that she was graduating half a year earlier, and she informed me it is a full year earlier. (If you go back and look for the misinformation, you won't find it because I revised the entry for her.)

So yeah, short of some Gnomage, this has just been a PERFECT day! :)

Oh, and I didn't write anything today. Gnomage and creative inspiration are the only 2 things keeping this day from being just mind-blowingly perfect.

Still, how often do we get PERFECT, right? I'm usually quite pleased with "not-sucky"! "Surprisingly good" is usually... well, surprisingly good.

So a day like today... You won't hear any complaints from me! Only gratitude!

And now it's time to bid this day "Thank you, and good-bye," and get some sleep. Can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store for me!!! :D

Hope your Saturday is AWESOME!!!

:D

Too Much of a Good Thing...

... is just about enough, hehe! :)

Monday and Tuesday continued the great fun that Sunday started! :) My baby and I have been building her a proper garden that she can call her own! (This is something I've wished I could provide for her since we got married!!!)

I'm talkin' SecondLife, of course. I still don't own any RL land, and still haven't figured out how to get her here/me there, lol.

But I've gotten to spend so much time with that wonderful woman!!! It's like the old days, only BETTER, hehe! :D

It's so cool watching my sweety create stuff! She's so clever and creative! And she possesses a beautiful aesthetic(sp?)!!!

The garden we created feels like Easter to me, hee-hee! :D

Brian has created this groovy graveyard, which feels like Halloween, and a pirate hide-away that feels like sea-farin' fun, and I've created this drive-in theater which feels like summer, and my Hot-Thang has created a garden that feels like Easter!

In SL, we've got all the cool, child-like times of year covered, lol! :D

Oh, and when my Gnomey Goddess is asleep, Brian and I have been creating this neat world that we're going to turn into a bunch of movies and novels and stuff.

Good Times for Ray Jay!!!

Also, I've been listening to the radio serial from 1934 called "Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher" which is really groovy. Very cool! It has the feel of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel!

The radio was good to the character! The movies mostly turned Tarzan into a monosylabic oaf, but the radio seemed to always stick with the coolest traits of the character! So there's another little cool something in my life.

Okay, my sweety's asleep, so I'm going to go ahead and get ready for work. I want to get to work early tonight because I'm airing a repeat of the pilot for REAPER, which was directed by Kevin Smith, and which I've only heard good things about.

Last night I got to see the pilot episode of BIONIC WOMAN and it was REALLY FUN!!! If you haven't seen it, you should check it out at NBC.com!

You may be able to watch REAPER at CWTV.com, but I haven't really looked into that too closely. (I sort of checked it out at work, but you have to download an HD player to watch episodes, and I didn't want to risk it on a work computer...)

Okay, I'm off.

PEACE!!! :D

ASTOUNDING Start To The Weekend :)

My baby is sleeping.

I know because she fell alseep with her webcam on, hehe.

I can't see her: She closed it because the screen was too bright. But the connection hasn't broken yet. (In the past, when I've read her to sleep, sometime after she fell asleep her computer would disconnect. But somehow, not this time.)

I woke up early enough to catch her online, and we chatted for a bit, then she invited me to a webcam conversation and I found myself with her and her brother and friends of her brother!

I got to party with her brother & friends!!! :D

Techonology rules!

I can actually say that I spent Sunday at a casual party with Gnomey!!! :D Because I did! I mean, I wasn't PHYSICALLY there, but I helped her in a game they were all playing, and I chatted with one of her brothers and his girlfriend and one of his friends!

I wasn't there, but that's how I spent my evening! With the Internet, this is the type of stuff William Gibson made a name for himself speculating about! (Well, the beginnings of it, anyway, hehe.)

And then after the party Gnomey and I went upstairs to her room, she got comfortable and I read her the first 9 chapters of THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, hehe. :)

About 4 chapters in Mom called to see how Brian and I were fairing, and Gnomey heard my end of the conversation. I know she wasn't alseep yet because she typed to me afterward. Then I resumed my reading until I was pretty certain she was asleep.

Now I'm just chillin' while my sweety catches some Zs, hehe. :D

It's been quite a while since we got to share this much time together, and we haven't before been able to do ALL THIS together!

THIS IS SO COOL!!! :D

This would be cool even if you weren't dating someone in another country: Imagine you're sick and can't go to a party; you could have someone video IM you and you could watch and listen to your friends having fun!

Well, okay, that's a silly example, lol.

I'm just very pleasantly surprised at the way this night has turned out! I've interracted with my Gnomey Goddess before, but this is the first time I've interracted with her family, lol! And for such a LONG period of time! Our connection crashed a few times throughout the evening, but not too much!

This has just been a REALLY NICE evning for me!!!

And just on the other side of that video screen, my angel is resting peacefully, hopefully dreaming of sweet, wonderful things! :D

And if she woke up right at this moment, she could see me writing this entry, and go "Wot u doin'?" and I could go "Bloggin'" and she could go "Come back to bed" and then I'd climb through the screen and...

No wait...

Just drifted off into Fantasy for a second...

Okay, I'm back.

Anyway...

Very cool night for Ray Jay! :D

Oh, some announcements...

We didn't win the Lottery last night. :( So it will be a bit longer before I can get my sweetness over here and buy us a house and propose to her and all that.

It sucks, but that's the way it is for now. ("For now" being the operative phrase: Everything changes, always.)

Also, Bloodshots sent out the list of finalists a few days ago, and we weren't on it.

So the chances of Robert Rodriguez seeing our short and calling Tommy and offering to produce our first feature are greatly descreased.

But once again, that's just for the time being.

The good news, however:

First, Tommy noticed that none of the finalists were burdened with our subgenre -- "Possessed Child. The reason I consider this a bit of good news is that it suggests that the other 3 applicants with this subgenre might not have been able to pull it off any better than we did. In other words, it might not have been that our filmmaking abilities are inferior, just that the subject matter was a tough challenge to pull off in less than 2 days.

Think of it this way: You can do a successful movie about the Holocaust, but how LIKELY is it? Spielberg pulled off SCHINDLER'S LIST, but if ANYONE ELSE had directed that movie, would people have gone to see it?

Maybe... it's based on a really good book! But if you just said "It's a movie about the Holocaust" would people have been as likely to see it as they were when -- just after JURASSIC PARK -- you said "It's Steven Spielberg's new movie"?

My point being that the subject matter of a flick can bias your chances of entertaining an audience with it. (or, you know... even getting the audience interested in watching it.)

And there's an inherent hokey-ness about a movie about a possessed child.

We may have made THE BEST of the Possessed Child movies, and STILL not made it to the finals.

So I take some degree of comfort from that.

Secondly, since we're out of the running we should be able to post the short soon!

Okay, you may be saying "If it didn't make it to the finals, why would I want to watch it?"

That's a good point.

But if you DID want to watch it, you should be able to do so soon, hehe. ;)

If for no other reason, you might watch it to see what we did in 48 hours. You've got to be wondering about that. (Most shorts take weeks or months to make, and they aren't restricted in their genre, subgenre, weapon that MUST appear in the film, prop that must appear in the film and line of dialogue that must appear in the film. So it might be interesting to see what we did in that timeframe with those creative restrictions!) (Maybe, hehe.)

If Bloodshots puts up an official page with the other entries on there, I'll be sure to draw your attention to it, as well. (I'm curious to see our competition. Just to judge for myself how well we did, comparitively.)

Um...

I think I'm out of stuff to gab about for now.

PEACE!!! :D

***********************************

UPDATE:

MY GNOMEY WENT TO WORK!!!

Well, that part sucks. BUT WE DID WAKE UP TOGETHER!!! :D

I read for a couple of hours after I blogged, and listened to some Alice Cooper. Then I got drowsy and decided to take a nap in here.

I woke up to some scratching noices on Gnomey's microphone... It was her waking up!

So I hopped out of bed and into the chair, and I got to see and talk to her FIRST THING IN THE MORNING!!!

Now, I know stand-up comedians (even female stand-up comedians) have been making jokes about how women look first thing in the morning since the early 80s, but let's be real: The woman you love is fuckin' GORGEOUS first thing in the monring!!!

I mean, I'm assuming this a natural phenomenon.

If it's not, if the woman you love isn't just eye-poppingly adorable when she first wakes up, then I TRULY AM -- hands down, bar none, without a doubt -- THE luckiest guy IN THE WORLD!!! :D

Because my Gnomey Goddess is every bit the goddess when she first wakes up!!!

She can (and probably will) deny it to her dying day, but I can now say, imperically, that she is GORGEOUS, even just after a night's sleep! :D

(I just hope I wasn't too much of a dog to look at, lol.)

So she wakes up and we resume our conversation on video, and then she talks about seeing if her computer can stay in SecondLife without crashing her out, and we end up spending all morning in Sl! Just like Old Times... only BETTER!!!

When we were first a couple, the new-ness was exciting and all. Everyone loves that nervous/elated feeling of a brand new relationship. But Gnomey and I have been together for over a year now! There's a degree of comfort there. A degree of security that you can't get at the start of a relationship!

Plus...

She hasn't been able to go in-world for quite some time now! So there were all kinds of new things I could show her!

(I have to confess that when she and I are online together -- in SL or on IM -- for more than 5 minutes I get all giggly and quiet and... well... BORING, lol.

I can't think of stuff to do or say. I just sort of sit and bask, lol.

So it was nice to be able to run around and show her what Brian and I have been up to in-world in her absense.

And OMG is she a SWEETY!!! :D

It was really just a GREAT evening/morning for me!!!

I mean, I never FORGET why I love her, but after a while of absense I just sort of take for granted the fact that I love her. You know? So when I get to spend THIS MUCH time with her, I'm reminded all over again the reality, the details about just why I love her SO MUCH, and why I KNOW that she is THE woman for me!!! :D

Like, someone asks you what your favorite movie is, and you say "Raiders of the Lost Ark" because you just have, over the years, gotten used to the fact that that's your favorite movie. But then you watch it again, and you're cringing when Indy almost gets killed eight billion times, and you're laughing at the dry humor, and just loving the roller coaster ride of the movie, and then you remember "Oh yeah! THAT'S why this is my favorite movie!"

I'm doing a lot of analogies in this entry, aren't I?

It's kind of like when...

Just kidding. ;)

Hope your Monday is FANTASTICALABULOUS!!!

:D

You Want Me To Win The Lottery Tonight :D

My baby sent me THE SWEETEST email today!!! :D xoxoxo

I'm tellin' ya, SHE is THE ONE!!!

So here's what's gonna happen: I'm gonna win the lottery tonight, but I'm gonna wait until after I ACTUALLY HAVE the money in my bank account before I call her and tell her.

Then, over the phone, I'm booking a flight here for her for whenever she wants.

Then I'm going house-searching and I'm gonna find the closest house ('cause I ADORE North Austin) that's on the market and put down half whatever they're asking.

Then when she gets here I'll plan an amazing day of lunch at Carabo's or Spaghetti Warehouse, then a movie (I'll let her pick) then relaxing at the duck pond, then a surprise trip to a jewelry store in the Arboretum ('cause it's near the duck pond) where I'll have enough cash on hand for her to pick out ANY engagement ring she wants, then I'll propose to her on the spot, and we'll go for dinner afterward.

Sounds solid to me. :)

Although... if I don't win the lottery tonight, the plan will probably change a bit.

Then I continue working on my novel, and wait until I DO win the lottery.

Or sell the novel, it sells a million copies and Dreamworks buys the filmrights to it.

Something. We'll see how it plays out. I'm keeping fluid so I can go with the flow.

But I'm going with Plan A for now.

If, at 10:10 pm I discover I somehow don't win the lottery, then I'll revise.

But you want me to win...

How COOL of a blog entry would that be?!! :D

You SO want me to win!

Think of it this way: I win the lottery and become a millionaire, I PROMISE to live the most amazing life so that you ALWAYS have something cool and astounding to read! That's fair, right? ;)

(I'll even try to sneak in some of the dirty stuff Gnomey and I do when I'm pretty sure she's not keeping up with the blog, hehe!)

If -- on the off- chance -- I don't win the lottery tonight, I hope YOU do!!!

:D

An Odd Thought...

I was just considering -- as is appropriate, coming off of International Talk Like A Pirate Day -- the picture my Gnomey Goddess took of the statue of the pirate with the eye patch and realistic hook hand and peg leg.

And it occurred to me that that is one pitiful bloke.

I mean, he got -- what? -- 10, maybe 30 extra gold pieces per lost extremity when he was paid his prize money at the end of the voyage.

And you gotta HOPE the poor guy was already captain, or at least an officer, by the time he lost all his bits, because then he could get his subordinates to swab the deck, climb the rigging, sew the sails and knot the ropes. Because THIS GUY wasn't doing ANY of that anymore!

The man lost an eye, a hand and a leg!

If this was guy was just a deck hand, he had to find a new career at the end of that voyage!

Just a random thought that popped into my head as I wait for the remaining half-hour of my shift to pass.

;)

Happy Belated TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!!!

Less than an hour left in the day proper as I post this, but I had to wish everyone a happy Talk Like A Pirate day!

I slept most of it, since I have work tonight.

But Brian and I talked pirate talk at each other and wore Jolly Rogers shirts, hehe.

Brian actually had YELLOWBEARD playing in the living room while he pirated around SL. So he really celebrated.

I used a bill of "pirate money" (one of several cute pirate-themed party favors Brian bought recently and shared with me) to mark Dean Koontz's BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON, which I started re-reading again last night.

I'm hoping that whatever transpires over the next 12 months, starting today, next year I'll be celebrating Talk Like A Pirate day with my sweety, in person!!! I can just imagine her and Brian and me all talking like pirates all day to each other! :D

It'll happen, you just wait and see!

Meanwhile, my day is going surprisingly well for a "Monday" (or a WedThur).

I fell asleep listening to BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON on audio cassette (I SERIOUSLY need to replace that with mp3, as my jambox is dying, I suspect... that or the tapes are) and I would sleep for maybe an hour and a half, then wake up, turn the tape over, listen to a side, then fall asleep to the second side and sleep for another couple of hours.

I had me some interesting dreams.

Not exceptionally cool, and not bad, either. Just interesting.

At one point I woke up, and I as tried to fall back to sleep without listening to more BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON I came up with the opening for my current project. (I had AN opening, but this one is better, I feel.)

After I filled 3 1/2 pages in my notebook, I turned BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON over and listened some more, falling asleep before that side of that cassette (like, tape 5 or tape 6 or something) was finished.

Finally, I woke up around 4:00 pm (which would be 10:00 pm by my sweety's time) so I grabbed my paperback version of BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON and set up shop at the computer.

I read the last chapter here at work just now.

Good story! I like it even more the second time!

When I first read it I was comparing it to FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE and ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN, which are both EPIC!!! Seriously, I believe both of those are Koontz's opuses. (Despite the fact that I haven't read NEARLY enough to be a real judge of his work.)

So when I read BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON it felt a little "light" by comparison.

THE TAKING is also "light" compared to ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN and FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE, but it's also just BAD-ASS!!! Seriously scary!!!

Whereas BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON is merely a riveting thrill-ride, lol. (I say that facetiously... Koontz RULES, and any perceived "shortcomings" of some of his work is really only by comparison to other of his work. You know?)

But going back to it, knowing generally what to expect, I was able to appreciate WHAT IS so much more!

Anyway...

So I've had more of a Halloween-y day than a pirate-y day, but that's cool. They both rule, hehe!

Hope your Talk Like A Pirate day was groovy, but I hope your day ahead is ASTOUNDINGLY GROOVY!!! :D

MY BABY'S BACK!!! :D

I just chatted with her!!!

But...

It turns out she got back yesterday and was online all day! She didn't have to work! :( This would have been a good thing, except that I was certain she said she would be gone until Tuesday, so I didn't even bother going online!

Somebody needs to invent, like, maybe a watch that you can wear that has a light that turns on when your baby is online, so where ever you are and whatever you're doing, you'll know that if you can get to a computer you can chat with them!

..well... except that most people tend to live in the same country as the person they love...

...so I would be the only person to buy such a device...

...and with a market of 1, the technology would undoubtedly be too expensive for me to afford...

That's it, isn't it? I simply can't afford my lifestyle. Or, you know, the lifestyle I want to have. It's been a year and I still haven't saved up enough to buy plane tickets for my Gnomey Goddess to come visit. Somehow, every month, the bills still keep coming, lol.

It seems logical (to me, anyway, in my twisted logic) that after 17 years of paying bills, all the bills would be paid off, forever! Right? Like a layaway plan for your life! You pay bills for, say, the first 10 years of your working life, then all your bills are paid! That's the way it SHOULD be. After your first 10 years in the work force, your bills are paid-off and you get to keep all the rest of your money from then on.

Maybe 15 years.

But then you get to spend the rest of your money the way you choose. You've already paid for all the food you're ever going to eat, so you can spend your paychecks on travel and movies and stuff. And MAKING movies, if that's what you're into!

Why is society not set up like THAT? That would be cool!

Or, you know, maybe if you could just pay ALL your bills with your first paycheck of the month, and then the second paycheck could be spent or saved any way you like. Even THAT would be better than living paycheck-to-paycheck.

But this nonsense of only making enough to cover that month's bills should be stopped.

I know, I know... You're saying "You just need to make more money." And I suppose that's how it actually DOES work, in theory. But I haven't figured out HOW, unless I gave up my writing time to take on another job.

But then, if I didn't have time to write, what would be the purpose of being alive? I wouldn't be a very fun person to be around -- I'd always be depressed and grumpy... and tired, lol.

Blah.

Anyway, sorry to go off on that little tangent, lol. The point is...

MY BABY'S BACK!!! :D

And she said she had a good time, so YAY! :)

I suspect my sweety NEEDED a vacation! She works so hard!

Speaking of work, I need to get back to my next project. (I'm creating this cool horror universe, but I can't figure out the story that takes place WITHIN the universe I've created, lol. Bit of a dilemma.)

PEACE!!! :D

Psych... as in Gotcha ;)

I have now seen 4 or 5 episodes of PSYCH!

HYSTERICAL show!!!

VERY groovy! :)

I've also seen 4 or 5 episodes of GHOST WHISPERER, and I've been crushin' on Jennifer Love Hewitt since I don't even remember how long, but the fact that she's a producer on that show make me even more infatuated!!! (I have only one True Love, and that's my Gnomey Goddess, the only woman I'll ever need. But a guy can be infatuated with a celebrity, can't he? hehe)

TROJAN WAR. That's the movie that make me a Love fan! I just remembered it. Then she did I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (the FIRST one)! And that pretty much sealed the deal for me.

Never saw PARTY OF FIVE, though. You'd think that for a guy to be a Love Hewitt fan he probably discovered her on PARTY OF FIVE, but I'm weird like that.

I also own a couple of her albums.

Is that wrong?

Anyway, I was talking about PSYCH...

Those "Psych-Outs" during the credits: BRILLIANT!!! You get the impression that everyone working on that show is having SUCH A GREAT TIME! And it SO comes through in the episodes, too!

Dule Hill... How brilliant is he?!!

I mean, he was PRICELESS on THE WEST WING -- as was EVERYONE else on that show!!! -- but it's so much fun to watch him in PSYCH!

Truly a comic genius!!!

'Cause he's got the harder role. It's easy to play Shawn Spenser, the wacky party character. (I know, I've played that character before in a production of Larry Shue's THE NERD.) The comic character gets all the best lines. But to play a straight man, and not have every scene stolen from you, THAT's hard work! (Just ask Zeppo Marx. That's the reason the Marx Brothers became a trio after 5 movies.)

And Dule Hill has the SKILL to share a frame with someone else chewing the scenery!!!

And the WRITING!!! It's really a one-camera sit-com (like SCRUBS or MY NAME IS EARL) that lasts an hour and happens to have a mystery, lol!

The show's just brilliant!

USA Network has it goin' ON! I've seen 3 shows from them -- BURN NOTICE, PSYCH and MONK -- and I am just SO IMPRESSED! And their tagline is "Characters wanted", a stout promise for a TV network. And THEY DELIVER!

Ooh. That reminds me: I have an episode of BURN NOTICE waiting for me! I should get to that soon.

My baby isn't supposed to be back until Tuesday, so there's no point in me logging onto my IM. So I can curl up and watch BURN NOTICE on the little dvd player in my room, then crash when it's over.

In fact, gonna do that now.

OH! But one thing first: I can't imagine how you could have possibly figured it out from the last entry I posted, so I'll repeat the information: The Bloodshots winners will be announced on September 27th at an Awards Ceremony for Fantastic Fest.

I'm hoping that if we make it into the finals we'll hear about it before then.

But one way or another, you should be hearing from me around that time to let you know how our 48-hour short fared.

My baby said we're gonna win, so it should be good news when I announce it, hehe. ;)

Have a fantastic day!!!

:D

Super Karate Monkey Death Car

I'm going to give you the first 2 paragraphs I originally wrote for this entry so that you'll know what is going on here, lol:

"I don't have much to say this morning so I, Ray Jay Edwards, am writing a blog entry and running it through a couple of translation programs, then having it translated back into English in hopes of creating an entertaining piece of reading.

"I got the idea off the TV show News Radio. Jimmy James writes an autobiography that sells poorly here in the States, but sells gang-busters in Japan, so he has it re-translated into English to see if it sells any better than the original release. The translation is HYSTERICAL, so I'm hoping I can produce similar results."

Now the rest, you'll have to make out yourself! :D


Do not have says today I thus tomorrow, will send out light Ray Eichelhaeher Edward, will write blog to record and the company he by the program 23 translations, then the translation will return to him becomes English to hope to observed value piece cause which persisted.

I have accepted the idea from the television apparatus publication RADIO INFORMATION. Jimmy James writes however sells extremely here in a condition autobiography, the group individual sale in Japan, therefore it leaves behind it by English zurueckuebersetzen, looked, if it sells regardless of how is just like the primitive release. Translation alienation, therefore I hope my approximate result product the canned food.

Otherwise, my day enough is notrmal. Any not mainly has not submitted report/ratio.

I am removen with this! Is the equally curious discovery! !

At first although, I need, can be smoke reduction...

Okey dokey I returns.

Thus, I have not this morning awaked, more haengen-ueber, because I last night contained. I am the tired dog which died and slightly request the real sleep.

Thus, I have struck the bag and tumble, alseep it is WER, DR. wathcing. That truly fashionable publication is! ! ! I have dug it!

Then, I have early needed the care.... Thus, I ran again.

Then I needed to care about and to complete WER, DR. myelf the pizza cake has been manufactured to the base attention raise, chowed and PSYCH and MOENCH my first plot!

I have accepted, your that explained some truly new publication is! I have the leisure quantity today before the work!

The work ventilates.

I adopted Bloodshots to us to form a front weekend short-circuiting, the sector can thus to outside his here 23 friends. In brief general pleasant answer. Above the movie misses as if does not have "certainly to form" in 48 hours "narrower supply". Is similar to us to look wants the customs duty by seeking knowledge.

Moreover is on September 27, if our soap hopes your approval, goes to here putty in yours eye...

Rough Night...

HOLY MOTHER OF ALL THAT IS LESS THAN MORALLY QUESTIONABLE!!!

Last night/This morning was, as My Genius friend Dave might put it, one of those nights that justifies my having a job!

You ever have one of those days where every half hour or so you console yourself that this can't go on much longer, despite the fact that it's already been going on an hour and a half longer than you thought it possible could have done?

That was last night for me.

I mean, okay... Maybe I'm being a little melodramatic (maybe), but goodness gracious am I worn out!!!

Okay, ThurFris -- you may remember from previous blog entries -- are the bane of my existence since from 1a to 5a I'm along running 3 stations and also catching the bulk of next week's programming. (Actually, the true bulk comes down on WedThurs, but the Other Overnight Guy and I split master control, so there's a full HALF of our overnight duties that neither one of us has to worry about. More manageble that way.)

Well last night started out yesterday morninhg, really, when I stayed up a couple hours too late downloading the BBC Radio 2 series of Flight of the Conchords.

I had a payday, I'm still obsessing over FotC just as much as ever... By the time I got home I was obsessed with the notion of clicking over to the UK version of iTunes and buying the series.

So I logged in, I clicked "Buy" and then I'm informed that my account only allows me to purchase from the US version of the iTunes store.

:(

So I buy and burn the EP "The Distant Future" -- I'm hell-bent on giving FotC some of my money at this point -- and then I get the very groovy idea that maybe, just MAYBE the BBC Radio 2 series might be available somewhere ELSE on the internet.

God bless BitTorrents!!!

Normally, when I download a BitTorrent it's an overnight thing. But since the BBC Radio 2 series is just 3 hours total (6 half-hour episodes in all), it only took 2 1/2 to 3 hours to download! So I waited!

Now, that's 1 1/2 to 2 hours past the latest time I should be going to bed...

But...

You don't understand: I REALLY wanted to hear this series, lol!

So I stayed up and pretty much WATCHED the last hour-and-a-half of the download.

(Did I mention that I get obsessive?)

(Plus, I was listening to FotC music, so it wasn't that painful, hehe.)

Then after it's downloaded, I HAVE TO load it onto my iPod, because otherwise what's the point, right? (And, of course, everytime I load my iPod I have to go back and reload everything the ipod strips out when it syncs up...)

And then, when I slip the iPod into the cradle to recharge, I can listen to stuff while it's charging... So I fall asleep about half-way through the third episode of the BBC Radio 2 series...

But on a normal day -- even a normal ThurFri -- this lack of sleep wouldn't be a bother. In fact, I might even grin when I felt particularly tired sometime during my shift, remembering why I didn't get enough sleep in the first place.

But tonight I had to air a baseball game. :(

A baseball game is a live event.

A live event means that I have NO IDEA when my breaks will air, and therefore must pay attention to my station COMPLETELY until the event is aired.

I must now explain: Most master control operators my age wouldn't have a problem with this, because they grew up in TV when MC Ops had to trigger EVERY EVENT AS IT AIRED.

But I'm a wuss. I grew up in TV (well, in Master Control, anyway) as computers began triggering just about everything, and the master control operator just had to keep an eye out on what is happening and what is about to happen. In the current age of master control operations, I can usually spot a problem half an hour before it happens, and therefore insure it doesn't happen.

(I'm over simplifying my job here, and apologize to any and all master control operators who might be reading this, lol.)

The point, though, is that since computers took over the basic running of the programming, we have been given more and more duties to take care of while the programming is airing.

And when (on the, admittedly, rare occasion) I air a live event, all the work I would normally be doing while keeping an ear open for my on-air programming and looking up every 10 to 15 minutes for a visual confirmationthat all is, indeed, well, has to wait until the live event is over.

And when said live event is a game of any sort, that might be 15 minutes before it's scheduled to end, or an hour and a half AFTER.

THAT takes some quick thinking.

Tonight's game ran long by 23 minutes and some odd seconds. (I could have told you exactly how may second 6 hours ago, but I'm home now, and that information is permanently removed to the Recycle Bin of my brain. By the time I wake up the "23 minutes" part will probably have been banished there, as well.)

I'm sure you see where this is going...

I was 3 hours, 23 minutes late in performing my normal ThurFri duties, blah, blah, blah...

Plus, I actually arrived (VERY unusual for me) 15 minutes early to try to get a jump on my shift.

It's not all bad, really.

Actually, there are SEVERAL positives: When the game finally ended, it ended neatly so that I could easily join my regularly-scheduled programming in progress. (A kindness games usually don't bestow upon ops.) I had good people watching my back during the game. Though I started my regular ThirFri dutes several hours late, I only left work 1 hour late. And when I got off work (FINALLY) I was able to unwind during the beginnings of Morning Rush Hour traffic with an episode of Flight of the Conchords!

Life is good, really.

But sense 4:00 am (-ish) I've been wrestling with the growing feeling of "give it a fucking rest already!" You know that feeling, that begins as a knot between your shoulder blades (where you can't reach to massage it out yourself) and the expands across your shoulders and up your neck until you wish you were just made out of Silly Putty so you could melt into a sobbing puddle on the floor.

You know the feeling.

In my 20s I could pretty much massage away all the tension in my body myself. But it seems that with each decade the tension finds new crevices in which to ensconce itself, lol.

Anyway...

Thanks for letting me vent!!! :)

I feel better.

Hope your Friday is COMPLETELY STRESS FREE!!!

:D

Back to Real Life, hehe

So last night Mom came into town and took Brian & I to Red Lobster, and we got to chow on some tasty sea food!

And that was really cool, but just before we had to leave I got some Wendy Time! She actually figured out how to get (and stay) in SecondLife for a while! (Her computer and SL haven't been getting along for months now.)

It was monumental!!! :D

But then the conversation got confusing for me, and then suddenly she's going out of town until Tuesday, and so I won't be able to figure out what happened until next week. (If something did happen, still not sure, lol.)

But I got some quality Gnomey Time for a bit there! :D That's always cool.

And since my baby isn't going to be online for the rest of the week, I can watch movies and stuff. I mean, I watch movies anyway, but I try to stay close to the computer when there's a chance she'll be online, natch, hehe.

OH! I haven't blogged since Monday: Tisha turned 17 Tuesday!!! :D

It was cool; I was crashed -- still catching up on sleep -- and my phone awoke me with a text message: "Happy Birthday to me." I look at the time and it's 12:01 am, lol. In the past I've called her at midnight on her birthday. I think she waited a minute, then texted me to remind me, lol.

So I called her and we chatted and caught up with each other's lives.

She reminded me that I HAVE TO be there in May... She's graduating A YEAR EARLY!!! My daughter! Graduating a whole year early!!!

I was never very academic, you see. I made the best grades I could (a) continue acting with while (b) exerting the LEAST amount of effort.

See, the theatre troop I was a member of for 8 1/2 years was affiliated with the school. Twice a year we would have "School Shows" wherein an entire class (like, say, 7th Grade) would be bussed in from all of Odessa to see one of our plays. The kids got a taste of culture, and we usually got 3 days off from school.

As a result of this, we had to maintain passing grades to do the plays.

I am not proud to admit that in the latter part of my high school career I flunked out of a couple of plays, and had to teach my role to someone else. :(

Because it interfered with "b" above: In the last couple of years I had to actually do some school work to pass. I was used to just sort of absorbing the knowledge without putting forth much effort. But after my Freshman year of high school they started assigning more work and spoon-feeding us less. (Something about getting us ready for college or something, I dunno, lol.) ;)

After getting replaced on 2 shows, you can bet I started putting in any and all work needed to stay in the last few plays I had left before I graduated!!!

And when I started doing the work, a strange thing happened: Instead of Bs and Cs, I started making As, lol!

Tisha, however, has NEVER had this problem!!! She's ALWAYS been a A-Student!

We do, apparently, have one academic trait in common, though. This last year she admitted that her school work was getting harder. She didn't used to really feel like she was making much of an effort to get her As. But last year she discovered she was working harder to maintain her A grade-point average.

I thought that was interesting. That an A student and a C student, going through the school process 20 years apart, would experience a similar phenomena.

Still, that's got to be the ONLY place where I can compare myself to Tisha as far as school is concerned, lol.

So, as you can imagine, I am SO INCREDIBLY PROUD of Tisha and her accomplishments!!!

Also, allow me to emphasize that I LOVE learning new stuff now!!! When I got out of school and into "real life" I finally understood what was meant by "knowledge is power"! The Internet is this vast, free library and every time I have a question about ANYTHING I hop on the Net and grab some answers.

Granted, you have to be very, very careful about where you seek those answers on the Net, lol. It's easy to Google, say, "mind control" and stumble onto some badly constructed, 20,000-word essay by some dude living in his parents' basement holding court on how the government is using the fluoride in municipal water as a conductor to channel subliminal messages through the population's skulls.

I'm not saying this guy isn't right (the hyper-intelligent squirrels are the REAL ring-masters of this insidious conspiracy, I have discovered!) but such information isn't really useful in any day-to-day context. (We simply can't fight the squirrels.)

Still, there are enough legit sites out there, and sites that offer opposing viewpoints that one can generally get a decent idea of what the truth on any given subject might be. Then after that: BOOKS!

But for whatever reason -- probably because it felt like work -- while I was in school I just never had an interest in anything outside dating and filmmaking. I want to blame the educational system... But that's kind of been done before, lol. (Plus, I do know for a fact that I wasn't trying my hardest, even when I was making As, lol.)

Dude! The first job she takes out of college, she will probably be making TWICE what I'm making now, lol!!! Within 2 years it'll probably be 4-times what I make.

Now, with any luck, by that time I will have figured out how to make money at my passions... Then we'll be making the same, lol.

Anyway...

Okay, so I'm kind of killing time now. It's 5:22 am, and I just woke up from a LONG "nap". I need to be asleep in 3 hours for a full 8 hours before I head back to work.

After dinner last night Brian & I came home and watched FINDING NEMO again...

There was this unintentional theme going on yesterday...

I woke up and Brian was in SL fishing with our new fishing rods. He had made all these cool adjustments to our Pirate Hideout, and the place is like a kid's fantasy of a pirate hide-away!!!

So I joined him fishing, checking out his cool additions to the place, and we fished for HOURS until my baby came online and we started chatting in IM. She tried to get SL to cooperate with her computer for the longest time, and EVENTUALLY DID! So then she and I chatted in there for a bit until it crashed her out and she needed to get to bed (LONG day at work today :( ).

Then we chatted on IM for a bit longer until Brian & I had to go.

So what were we hungry for when Mom asks us where we want to go?

You got it! (Luckily, Mom was down, too, hehe.)

So then when we get home, stuffed to the gills (pardon the vaguely cannibalistic-sounding pun), I had this overwhelming urge to be in the ocean for 90 minutes.

After NEMO I just HAD TO lay down and allow myself to fall asleep, if that's the way things went.

After 2 episodes of FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS on my iPod, that's EXACTLY how things played out, lol.

Then I woke up.

I checked my IM to see if maybe I could catch Gnomey before work, but (1) she had to go in early today and (2) she had said last night that she would talk to me next week 'cause she had to pack for her trip. So I wasn't surprised not to see her.

And then here we are.

If I don't blog for the rest of the week, it's because I'm not at my computer as much, with My Gnomey-Goddess being away and all.

Then again, you know me... If a thought pops into my head -- just any random thought, lol -- I'll very likely hop on the keyboard long enough to jot it down and bore you with it, hehe. ;)

So between now and then: PEACE!!!

:D

48 Hours To Make A Movie...

There is something very, very wrong with the people at Filmmaking Frenzy.

I'm not joking.

There is something twisted and sadistic and more than a little malicious about them!

Okay, going into Bloodshots I knew that I would have to wait until 7:00 pm before we would know what Sub-genre, Weapon, Shared Prop and Line of Dialog we HAD TO USE in order for our movie to qualify for the contest.

Which means that the writing process could not begin before 7:00 pm.

When you have only 48 hours to shoot, edit and burn a movie to dvd, you'd really rather have a script already written.

Tommy, Brian & I had worked on our quick-writing skills, flexed the Creativity Muscle to limber-up and get prepared to write on the fly. We had examined and considered a number of Horror sub-genres that were likely to be thrown our way, so that we could -- hopefully -- quickly cobble together a great story in an hour or 2.

I wake up late. WELL late. In order to get to the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar before 7:00 pm, we needed to leave about 6:30 pm.

That's about the time I woke up.

Luckily (for me), Tommy went there after work. The unfortunate part is that he didn't discover this contest, he didn't sign up for it, and the real reason he's doing it is because Brian and I are committed to it. We need a director, and he's not gonna let his life-long buddies down -- whatever the personal inconveniences to himself.

Because I'm all groggy and stuff, I'm thinking that it doesn't really matter if we pick up our instructions late, so long as our shooting and editing and burning are finished in time.

But Tommy has been waiting around outside the Drafthouse for, maybe, and hour for his buddies (whom he's sacrificing for) to show up.

So Tommy isn't in the best of moods when I finally call him, lol.

Very luckily for me, when I awake Brian has baked up a pizza, and has left half for me. (The frozen pizzas I usually buy cut neatly into 6 decent-sized slices, so that leaves 3 slices for me.) PLUS, Brian has made coffee!!! (He works at Starbuck's, so we get to drink really, really good, strong coffee!)

By the time we're on MoPac (close to the Drafthouse) it's 7:00 pm and Tommy calls us. He's starving by this time, so he has us meet him at a Whataburger so we can discuss our Plan Of Action.

Our sub-genre: Child Possession.

Our Weapon: Lasers.

Our Shared Prop: Corn

Our Shared Line of Dialog: "Is that thing real?"

WTF are we gonna make of THIS MESS?!!

Okay, here's what we KNOW we can rely on to make this movie: Brian, My Super-Hot Friend Whom I Will Never See Naked Traci and me, plus a handful of interesting interior and exterior locations. Brian's got tons of stage blood, and several fascinating (REAL) edge weapons.

And our sub-genre is Possessed Child.

:(

Now, it just so happens that Tommy has a very intelligent and articulate 3-year-old daughter. He and his wife, Becky, raise her with love and attention and communication, so we can count on at least 3 good scenes out of her.

But obviously we need to cut to the possessed daughter as an adult, so that Traci (a non-actor) can take on the dramatic responsibilities of the character. (BTW, Traci, at this point, has NO IDEA that we're going to ask this of her. She thinks she's going to be a pretty victim off-ed in the first couple of minutes, lol.)

So at Whataburger off Ben White and Lamar, Tommy & Brian & I try to work out a story wherein a child is charged with holding a demon into adulthood, when she will eat the heart of an influential politician and (a) destroy that politician and his work and (b) gain more power for the demon she holds inside her.

But I – “the writer of the group" -- have a problem with this: The story Tommy & Brian are into really needs to be a feature, because there's too much back-story (even if we DON’T "spell it out" for the audience and explain EVERYTHING that's going on) for a 2-8 minute short.

Still...

It's the only story we have. And as Brian & Tommy head to our apartment in Tommy's truck, I drive alone in my car, trying to force all these elements into a satisfying short story THAT WE CAN SHOOT IN 46 HOURS.

The advantages of their story is that we can shoot the majority of it Friday night/Saturday morning, before the sun comes up, which is one of the major points of our plan. If we can knock out the actual "production" (or filming) portion of our movie Friday night/Saturday morning, that leaves us Saturday day, Saturday night and Sunday morning-noon to edit the flick and burn it to disc.

THAT is the way you make a movie in 48 hours... You shoot in less than a day and use the rest of the time to edit it. If it takes you 36 hours to shoot your short, you WILL NOT finish in time.

One thing people don't realize about movies is that it takes the LONGEST time (usually, if it's a GOOD movie) to write it. Then the second-longest amount of time is spent in the editing/pick-up shooting period.

Production (the actual shooting of the film) is the SHORTEST, easiest, most fun process of the production. If the movie has a good producer, or good producers, then the Production part (which, interestingly, is the part MOST publicized by Entertainment Magazines and Behind-The-Scenes documentaries) is really just adults playing Pretend, and other adults capturing the playing in the most artistic way they can manage.

The "heavy lifting" of ANY movie is Pre-Production and Post-Production.

Understanding this, my brain wants to burst out of my skull trying to fit all the elements Brian & Tommy & I have discussed to make sure that the story we shoot is layered and textured and worth watching more than one time. I want to make sure that the very short story we're telling is a story that's worth being told.

And I can't figure out how to make what we've discussed into such a story.

I'm being melodramatic -- a luxury of hindsight, lol -- but at around 8:00 pm I was ready to throw up my hands and say "We can't do this" and just count my $25 entry fee as a financial loss and forget about it. I desperately wanted a drink, and I really wanted to play some Playstation 2 and just forget about this stupid-ass contest, lol.

Okay, so 8:00 pm rolls around, and Traci has been waiting to hear from us. As of our last conversation (Thursday night) Traci was expecting us to call her as we left the Drafthouse at 7:00 pm. But the way stuff worked out, Tommy got the envelope and Brian and I met him at Whataburger and discussed the options we could come up with for a while.

Just a footnote: How bad-ass is it that telling stories is maybe the ONE occupation in which you don't discuss THE OPTION available to you, but instead you discuss the OPTIONS available to you?!! THIS is one of the reasons I want to tell stories for a living!

So I call Traci and tell her about the monkey wrench that has been thrown into our plans and calculations.

At this point, I really don't understand how we're going to make anything that Rodriguez will watch and take note of.

If I haven't mentioned it before, Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, The Faculty, Spy Kids 1-3D, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, Sin City, The Adventures of Shark-Boy and Lava Girl 3-D, Grindhouse) will be judging the finalists, picking Number One ($1,000 and a computer set up as an editing suite), Number Two ($700) and Number Three ($300).

It is my opinion that the ONLY reason Tommy, Brian and I aren't working filmmakers right now is that no one knows us or what we are capable of. So if Robert Rodriguez were to see our short for this contest and recognize the ability we possess, we might have a shot at breaking into the industry and making our money doing what we love and are gifted at.

So I want a story that Tommy can shoot and get (positive) attention for!

But the story we're working on now (8:30-ish pm) doesn't feel like that story.

So Tommy & Brian & Traci & I keep going over and over our story possibilities, trying to figure out what we can shoot (and edit and burn to disc) in 45 1/2 hours that will be a fun ride for the judges.

With the sub-genre (Possessed Child) and weapon (Lasers) and shared dialog ("Is that thing real", which Traci immediately felt sounded like a penis joke) and shared prop (corn) that they've giving us, it seems like the judges of Filmmaking Frenzy are trying to coax us into a spoof flick. I mean HOW do serious filmmakers incorporate those limitations into a serious film within the genre of Horror?!!

Still...

The later it got, the free-er our minds became at exploring possible story potential. We came up with several seeds of several stories, exploring where each seed lead.

Until we found THE SEED...

Just looking at what (and who) we had to shoot with, and considering the limitations Filmmaking Frenzy had placed upon us, we discovered a story about a little girl with neglectful parents who is given an amulet -- discovered while she's wandering where she's not supposed to be while her neglectful parents are fighting with each other -- that possesses her and causes her to kill her neglectful parents!

Now THAT is a short film!!!

We talked and joked, and got the ball rolling. We were several scenes into the short before we realized that we really didn't know how to end it.

I -- with my 15 years of study in Writing, in general, and Screenwriting in particular -- realized that we needed THEME to figure out how the story was going to end. What would the movie be ABOUT? We've got this beautiful setup, but what are we trying to say with this setup?

Then Brian chimes in: "If you don't give your child attention, someone (or something) else will."

The notion was of the parents who let the TV baby-sit the Next Generation.

And the notion explained EVERYTHING we had come up with!!! Nature abhors a vacuum, so when you create an emotional/mental/spiritual vacuum between you and your child, you leave room for (possibly) a supernatural force to enter that vacuum and take on the role of child-rearer.

And that concept gave us the end of our movie!!!

NOW...

The problems presented themselves immediately...

We wouldn't be able to shoot a single frame Friday night. Tommy's 3-year-old daughter Amber was asleep and wouldn't wake up for 9 more hours. (It was about 9:30 pm when we had this story break-through.) So that meant we had approximately 21 1/2 hours for Production. Moreover, getting a 3-year-old to do some of the stuff we needed in a Horror movie might require Pick-Up Shots (often referred to in popular press as "Re-Shoots"), which a 3-year-old might not really be down for.

As we let Traci go to get a (more or less) decent night's rest, we understood that we had quite a daunting shoot ahead of us. But only Tommy -- Amber's father -- REALLY understood how daunting the shoot would be.

Brian and I packed up and headed for Tommy’s house, where I would spend the next 2 nights. Brian had to work Saturday and Sunday (poor dude!) so he would only spend Friday night there. But the story we had worked out had him playing a Creepy Stranger, and we could shoot him as soon as the sun was fully up.

Before we let Traci go, I had written a few pages of paragraphs that described our story in detail. Before Tommy and I could go to bed Friday night we needed to transcribe those paragraphs into something like a shot list, so we knew exactly how many scenes Amber was needed for, and exactly what happened in each of those shots. Brian and Tommy had drinks as we sat on Tommy’s back porch (where we could smoke) but I stuck with water, as I wanted to stay as sharp as I could be this weekend.

Brian retired to Tommy’s guest room before we were finished with the shot list. (He wasn’t really needed for the shot list, he was just keeping his friend and his brother company while we worked, bless him.)

I want to say it was about 1:46 am when Tommy and I turned in. Just over 41 hours to make our movie.

I woke up at 6:23 am. Tommy and his wife were still in their room, awakened at 6:00 am by their daughter.

I had a smoke and some coffee (Tommy and his wife don’t usually drink coffee, but they have a coffee maker which they bring out and plug in when Brian and I sleep over, hehe) and when Traci arrived at 7:30 am, we 4 set to work.

I say “we four” but really Becky, Tommy’s wife, worked just as hard as we did! When Tommy couldn’t figure out how to get Amber to do a scene, Becky knew how. In fact, I commented to her that it seemed as though she knew the answer all along, and just let Tommy and me try it our way first, then when it didn’t work she provided the ACTUAL solution, lol.

It was tough.

Things that Amber would regularly do without any problem became chores for her when the camera was rolling. Playing turned into work, it seemed, when “daddy’s movie” was on the line, lol.

We had a shot list with 45 scenes, and 26 of those scenes required Amber. By noon we had, maybe, a quarter of her scenes shot.

And we were shooting against the light. Once the sun went down, we would not be able to fake sunlight in the house (they have A LOT of windows) and so we couldn’t shoot. The only sequence we could shoot after the sun went down was my death scene in the garage. That’s IT. That’s all we could cheat. Everything else HAD TO be shot during the day, or the movie wouldn’t work.

AND…

It had to be shot SATURDAY or else we couldn’t finish the edit in time!

We discovered a working rhythm: We get a couple of shots out of Amber, then we play with her. Let her chase us, have tea parties with her, whatever she wants to do. Then we coax her into a couple more shots, then it’s Play Time again.

Around 1:00 pm – with well less than half Amber’s shots in the can – Becky took Amber to Chick-Fil-A for lunch. This allowed Tommy and Traci and I to shoot all of Traci and my fighting.

I’d like to note here that Amber, STILL, has NO IDEA what this movie is about. Tommy and Becky are not irresponsible parents, and the way we shot Amber’s scenes was such that she has no idea she was in a Horror film, lol!!! I point this out here because there are scenes when Traci and I yell at Amber, but Amber was eating Chick-Fil-A when we shot those scenes. I have a daughter (WHO TURNS 17 TODAY!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TISHA!!!) and Traci used to help with her mom’s nursery, and we’re all very respectful of the very sacred trust between adult and child, and we do not take our responsibilities as parents, “uncles” and “aunts” lightly. We adore and respect the Next Generation, and we have no desire to be the topic of future psychiatric sessions, lol.

So no children were harmed (physically, emotionally, and psychologically) during the making of this film.

Amber has no idea she was possessed, lol.

In the hour or so that Becky and Amber were eating lunch, we knocked out quite a few scenes.

I want to take a second to note that Traci and I are dear friends, and we’re both people who used to argue (with others) a lot, and then gained a sort of enlightenment about Life in general. And we have NEVER argued with one another. But the film required us to argue for at least 5 minutes straight. And watching the finished product, you would think that we genuinely HATED each other, lol! The movie’s not scripted, really. So we had to improvise our arguments (except for the line “Is that thing real?”) and it took Traci and me A LONG TIME to figure out what we were going to argue about!

There was one particular section where the argument was supposed to be very heated, and I called Traci a bitch. And the first take she broke up laughing. So we rolled again and then the second take she broke out laughing again. And I asked “What am I doing?” and, through her laughter, she said “You called me a bitch”. So I dropped the “bitch” part on the third take and the “argument” flowed seamlessly for many, many minutes after that.

So with just Traci, Tommy and me we were able to knock out 7 scenes, out of 45, but we still had more than half the movie to shoot with Amber.

When Becky and Amber arrived home, they had some Chick-Fil-A for us, so we all broke for lunch.

And I swear to you, as much as I love Chick-Fil-A, it has NEVER tasted as good as it did Saturday afternoon!!! OMG that was such a DELICIOUS sandwich!!!

Now we had until Amber’s nap time to get some shots, and then we’d have a few more hours after that before the sun went down.

It was an up-hill battle, a combination of shooting and playing with her (some very interesting games, I might add, that revealed the depth and breadth of her formidable imagination) but we eventually got ALL the footage we needed!!!

And I’ll be honest; there were about 3 shots that I thought we’d have to do without! They were shots we could live without and still tell the story we wanted to tell, but the movie would be richer if we had them. And in the 11^th Hour Tommy and Becky managed to coax them out of Amber!!!

Around 8:30 pm the sun went down, and Tommy & I had our movie almost in the can.

We still had 3 shots to capture: My death scene. We needed a 3^rd person to shoot that, because it involved blood squirting into frame as I sawed myself (under the possessed child’s power) with an electric saw.

Brian called after he got out of work and asked if we needed him. He wanted to just go home and get some much-needed sleep, but we talked him into coming over and helping us.

I have to note that Brian & I and Tommy live at the OPPOSITE EXTREMES of Austin. Tommy says that Brian and I live in “South Waco” and I accuse him of living in “North San Marcus”. If you look at a map of North America you can see that Texas is a HUGE state. Its capital city, Austin, is equally huge. Driving from one extreme of the city to the other like driving from one city in any other state to one of its neighboring cities.

So asking Brian to come help us get these shots was the equivalent of asking him to drive out of town.

But Brian is a trooper, bless him! He helped us out.

And God bless him! As short as that sequence is (the whole movie comes in at just under 5 minutes) it wouldn’t have been NEARLY as grizzly a death without his work!!!

So after production was completed, Brian and Tommy had a drink and we 3 had a smoke on Tommy’s back porch as Tommy and I prepared for the last stretch of the process: Editing.

With 22 ½ hours to go, Brian left to get some sleep before work Sunday and Tommy & I sat down at his Mac to cut this thing together.

Tommy had created this GENIUS setup with an extra monitor, so I could see EXACTLY what he was doing as he cut!

He used Final Cut Pro, and I’m more used to AVID, so he did most of the actual cutting. But was there, a second set of eyes, to help him make creative choices and to help him remember where the footage he wanted was. (If you haven’t edited on a computer before this might not make much sense.)

We were cutting about a page (of Shot List) an hour with smoke breaks after each page. Tommy cut 2 and I cut one page, moving a bit slower (I’m an AVID guy) than Tommy.

We edited until about 1:40 am (18 hours to go) we decided we were spent and decided to give ourselves 6 ½ hours of sleep.

I woke up at 8:30 am to pancakes, bacon and coffee!!!

I think poor Amber was feeling a little lonely. Daddy and Ray Jay were obsessed with the Mac and Brian wasn’t around, and the day before she had Ray Jay, Traci and Brian to play with. :(

But Tommy and I edited through lunch (Tommy in the “driver’s seat”) and we arrived at a more-or-less Final Cut around 4:30 pm. 2 hours until the competition deadline.

We burned a dvd, as a backup in case we didn’t have time to complete the flick, but we still needed 5 sound effects to fill in the sound. I was exhausted (I wasn’t just acting in and producing this film, I was also playing with the adorable – and ever-energetic – Amber) and at this point I was happy turning in the film as-is.

But Tommy (the director, the guy who gets credit for, or shit for, the finished product) felt we could probably record the missing sound cues and drop them into the flick and still burn a disc in time.

One of the sound elements we needed was 5 minutes of “ambient sound” or “room noise”, so than when a scene doesn’t have dialog or sound effects, you’re not just listening to silence.

We had 2 ½ hours until the deadline… 5 minutes is A LONG TIME!

But we recorded the ambient audio and the sound effects (we thought) and then discovered that I had hooked the mic into the WRONG INPUT on the camera!!!

We hadn’t recorded ANYTHING!

I’m thinking we go with the disc we’ve already burnt, and call it a weekend.

But Tommy re-hooked the microphone and went again, recording all the sound we needed to REALLY complete the picture, and then dropped them into the piece while I loaded the car (Brian came straight over after work, and he had the car we came in), and we said good-bye to Amber and Becky and we sped to the Alamo Drafthouse.

We dropped off our dvd at exactly 6:30 pm, 30 minutes left before the deadline. We were 12 of 59. There were still 47 teams (3 of whom were out of time, and had an extra 2 hours to finish) who hadn’t turned in their dvds when we left the Drafthouse.

And THAT is what I did over my Summer Vacation, lol.

I didn’t do any drinking this whole weekend, so I’ve been intoxicated since Brian & I got home Sunday night, lol. I’ve also done A LOT of sleeping! Monday was pretty much a blur, interrupted by 2 hours in which Brian and I watched SECOND HAND LIONS. :)

And I’ve watched our movie several times, and I can’t believe what we pulled off in the time we had to make it!!! It has layers! It has texture! The death scenes are grizzly! Amber seems spooky when she’s supposed to be spooky, and cute when she’s supposed to be cute!!!

Seriously, there is no reason we shouldn’t be doing this professionally!

We can’t post the video on YouTube until after the judging is over, but I will post a link THE MOMENT we can, so you can judge our final product for yourselves!

In the meantime, I’m gonna fix myself another drink and SLEEP some more!

:D

PEACE!!!