GOT TO CHAT WITH MY BABY!!!

Something weird happened yesterday... I couldn't get to sleep. Noon rolled around on Monday and I still hadn't gone to sleep.

So I decided to stay up and see if I could chat with my Gnomey Goddess -- because it was very unlikely I would be waking up in time to chat with her before she went to bed if I hadn't been to sleep by now -- AND I GOT TO TALK TO HER!!!

Which was, as always, very nice.

OMG I LOVE HER SO MUCH!!! hee-hee :)

Sorry. Couldn't contain it.

Um... So when did I last make an entry?

Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Right.

I've watched some more SPACED with Brian. In fact, it's currently his Default Disc... Meaning that he goes to sleep watching it and wakes up and presses Play All. And when he's on the computer, SPACED is running as background noise.

In fact, when I went to bed Monday evening I could hear him laughing at the show! (Don't tell him, because he's already overly concerned about making noise when I'm sleeping, lol. He's developed a sort of super-human hearing in order to keep the TV almost inaudible while I'm asleep. I can sleep through a tornado, but he's just an overly-conciencious kind of roommate, lol.) It was a really comforting and positive way to go to sleep. :)

Also, I have knocked out just A TON of preproduction work on our short last night with the help of this amazing free software called Celtx!!! At work Saturday night/Sunday morning I was able to enter my screenplay into the program. Tonight I went through and "tagged" props and characters and locations and makeup needs and so forth! Now I can print out lists of things we need in order to shoot.

Tommy's coming over tonight, and we need to talk about changes to the script. But the cool thing about this program is that can make those changes without affecting any of the lists I've built if it's not necessary! OR, if it IS necessary it'll take me maybe half an hour (depending upon how much we change) to make all the props/characters/locations/etc changes necessary!!!

One of the reasons we never got around to shooting the short we wrote last year is that we didn't really know exactly how to go about prepping the short. (Not one of the main reasons, mind you; but one of them.) But Celtx is constructed to give you this wide range of options, and you can focus on the ones that you feel are most important... AND, it allows you to organize them with ASTOUNDING EASE!

This isn't an advertisement for the program. (It's free, for one thing, and I don't imagine many people who stumble across this blog are filmmakers, for another, lol.) I'm just so excited about it! My Genius Friend Dave sent me the link to this program at the EXACT PERFECT time for it to REALLY come in handy, and for me to get the most out of it!!!

One of the REALLY cool aspects of the way Celtx works is the tools it provides for the DEVELOPMENT of a screenplay! I hope that after we shoot this short we'll be developing it into a feature-length screenplay to shoot next year. And I can use the character stuff I've already got when I expand the short into a feature!

In fact, I suspect I'll be using Celtx the next time I develop a screenplay (or novel) from scratch!

You have to download it and play around with it to understand what I'm going on about. But it's really amazing! And incredibly easy to use, once you figure it out. I battled Final Draft Pro (one of the -- if not THE -- industry standard screenwriting programs) for a few months before realizing that I know screenplay format better than the program does, and it would be faster for me to write a screenplay with WordPad (you know, the program you find in the Accessories menu of EVERY Microsoft OS).

I've since moved on to Microsoft Word because it allows me to add page breaks, which are handy when preparing a script for printing.

But NOW I'll likely just use Celtx exclusively!

Blah.

lol

Okay, um...

OOH!

As of tonight I have seen episodes 10, 9 and 2 of THE DRESDEN FILES. In that order, lol. My Genius Friend Dave is at work when it airs, so his wife tapes it and he burns discs to loan folks. So I'm catching up on the show. Good series! Very cool!

Ooh, and I watched a Masters of Horror dvd! "Pick Me Up", directed by Larry Cohen! The Masters of Horror series is cool because it's, like, mini-movies directed by the people who know how to direct horror movies. But the dvds are even COOLER because they're PACKED with stuff about how the individual episode was made! So I got to watch a good little flick (I wan't blown-away by it, but it was pretty good) and then I got to listen to the director talk about his approach to filmmaking in the past and in general, and then this particular story specifically... in great detail!

VERY useful stuff!!!

I've watched I-don't-know-how-many dvd audio commentary tracks, and have gained a great deal of insight into filmmaking in general. But I have never before felt as though I had just been taught a Filmmaking 105: Advanced class until I watched this Master of Horror disc!

So it's a very niche thing, granted. But because it's so niche, I haven't been provided with this much detailed information on the subject ever before!

Very cool!

Okay, it's about 15 minutes after Noon in the UK, and that means my baby is probably off to work or about to be headed off to work. So I think I'm gonna wind this down and go to bed.

:D

PEACE!!!