Ridiculous Ice Cream!

Hello! We are on our way again! Who's got the odds?

I have called this blog "Ridiculous Ice Cream" based on a note I made (now five years ago) while originally previewing/logging all the original "Seeing and Believing" footage.

Way back in the fall of 2002, I made a Preliminary Editing Decision List template (hereafter referred to as the PEDL) with a wooden ruler and a black marker, photocopied it several times, and turned on the first tape from Day 1 (Scene 6: Davis Square, "I'd like to invite you and your fascist roommate and her hunk of a boyfriend over for dinner sometime, but not if you're going to be all serious and angry and..."). Over the next year, I watched all 29 hours and made note after note after note about framing and usability, etc., hoping that at some point I would find a "real" editor to take the job over from me and pull our glorious endeavor together in a neat 100-minute narrative package. Alas, after a few hopes dashed over the first three or four years, eventually I gave up.

Then I participated in the "48-Hour Film Festival," this past June, and after helping out with the editing on that, began to think that maybe I... maybe I could just... maybe...

So, yesterday, looking at a month off from teaching, I took from the shelf the notebook that contains what eventually became more than 200 pages of PEDL notes. I made a copy of every page so that I could have one set sorted by tape # and one set sorted by scene #, and I sat down at my computer to look through Tape 1, reading my notes as I went. A few pages in, I saw, scrawled near the bottom of a "video" column, the words "ridiculous ice cream."

This was my log note to help me later with editing decisions: ridiculous ice cream.

It was not very helpful, but it definitely captured the essence of the issue. I laughed out loud, remembering our first day of shooting: the increasing heat (and traffic noise), the dripping green goo (then pink then vanilla-with-nuts) -- the continuity nightmare I created. My very first note to self for "next time" was basically, "ice cream in the summertime bad!"

It was certainly not the last mistake I made over those 29 days of shooting.

Looking at the phrase on the page yesterday, I felt that it captured more than just the literal less-and-less-frozen dairy dilemmas of that day in 2002; it seemed that there was something in it that spoke of low-budget independent filmmaking in general. Making a feature-length film for under $5000 (or under $50,000) _is_ ridiculous ("impractical" and "impossible" by so many reasonable standards), and it _is_ ice cream (yummy, sweet and also surprisingly nutritious, as treats go). And even though I knew I was going to have hair-pulling aggravations later because of the decisions I was making about the vanishing and reappearing quantities and the color and cone substitutions, I also knew we had to keep going. It was the first day of the shoot and didn't want to get bogged down or held up by a damned ice cream cone! Other things were more important.

The value of independent film is not to be found in any precision of continuity, but in its spirit of tenacity and its resourcefulness. Our ice cream might be ridiculous but at least its not a product placement!

And I might be five years older now -- no "might" about it -- we're all older, and I might be missing a couple shots here and there (something about Marissa waking up at dawn -- Hey, Chistine, still got that hair piece?) -- but AND I'm back at it, hoping Yet Again that before another anniversary arrives obnoxiously at the door of my guilty conscience, I will have something to offer those of you who gave so much to the Cause.

The first order of business will be to cut out as much of Scene 6 as I can -- it's five minutes long! Insane. I mean ridiculous.