"Well, I am."

                         MARISSA
          You know you're not the only one.

                         LARRY  
          Doesn't matter. 

                         MARISSA
          It does matter.

                         LARRY
          I'm not going to do it.

                         MARISSA
          Well, I am.  


Yay!!

I finished Scene 50!!  Woo hoo!

Now I have:

• Larry's suicide (attempted)
• Bill's coming out
• Friends gathering outside hospital room while 
• Amy sings to Larry inside
• Friends in Larry's hospital room.  

And that's it!!

Oh, well, plus some insert shots of clocks and the hairpiece, and I have to figure out whether or not I'm including the montages -- but editing-wise, I can smell the barn! 

Can I get an Amen?

Not so much

Well, it's Thursday now and I am still plugging away at Scene 50 -- the handheld "Showdown" scene.  It's much harder to put together than I expected, and my distraction level is high -- house- and dog-sitting -- so it's extremely slow-going.  I probably won't make my Dec 31st deadline at this point.  Not that anyone cares about that but me, really.  We shall see.

Entering Week 4

According to my well laid plan of a page and three-quarters per day, I should be finishing Scene 50 today.  I got some good work done yesterday after a few days of really dragging (depressed because I didn't get a job I REALLY WANTED, for which I had a second interview - hard to work devotedly under those circs), but I think I am about a day behind -- and I'm not sure I will get much done today.  Still, I had some "cushion" days built into my planning, so I'm not really too concerned yet about meeting my Dec 31st deadline.

Which is to say....

I am hereby announcing that I believe that within the next NINE DAYS, the rough cut (picture) of Seeing and Believing will be done!  God willing and the power doesn't go out.  Now, we just want to see it!

As of tomorrow, and then for four days, I will be house- & dog-sitting.  I think I'll be able to do good, concentrated work there.  I'm counting on it, in fact.  Why wouldn't I?  In any case, those are my "big Christmas plans" so it's not like editing will be competing with visiting family festivities or anything.

What I'm really hoping is that I'll be able to finish the narrative by the end of the 29th (Sat'y), and then have the 30th to shoot a couple things (ha! both clocks, actually -- one in the dining room, one to be next to Marissa's detached ponytail) and string everything together.  On the 31st, I might be taking a bus to Philly to see me mum, but that might happen on the 1st.  THEN, to start off the NEW YEAR right, I will start trying to figure out what's going wrong when I try to export and burn a DVD, because you know stuff will go wrong when I try to do that.

So that's the plan!

That man is on crack.

Scene 49 is now done!

This scene has the distinction of containing one of my favorite lines to say (see title of post).  It was the source of two separate takes-ruined-by-people-laughing -- one was me and one was Rachel A-O.  But guess what -- I had to cut the line!

I have loved that line for ten years, but it will not be in the movie.  It is lying on the proverbial cutting room floor as I type.  

Why?

Because it happens to be the ONLY time (I believe) (so far) that we managed not to get the line on camera in any way, form, or fashion and it's really not the kind of line that makes sense OS.  I mean, mayyybe I'll leave it in, OS, but the flow of the dialogue works just as well without it since no one actually answers him.

HOW did we manage NOT to get Kevin on screen for that last moment when he and Larry re-enter the dining room from the kitchen (where nothing was burning, despite Larry's sudden interest in such a possibility, moments before)?  HOW?

Coverage that whole day was weird -- as I said in the previous post (same day, both for us, working, and in the story).  The angles were weirdly directed, the coverage was oddly incomplete.  I had to put in a close-up of Marissa without its matching sound in order to have a transition shot from the MCU of Sarah and Amy to the last wide shot of everyone, otherwise, we wouldn't even have seen Larry running out the door and Marissa following him.  Not that that actually means anything to you, but since I don't believe you exist, reader, I'm just going to say it like that and not explain myself.

I'm about a day behind now.  Nervous about Scene 50, which I start tomorrow.

Scene 50 is the Showdown and it's the only scene we did fully handheld with some creative circling of the actors as they circled each other.  I cannot find my notes about it.  I lost them, and then found them recently (I remember my joy upon the discovery), but now I seem to have misplaced them again.  Or maybe I only dreamed about finding them, because I cannot imagine why I wouldn't have just put them with everything else.  Ugh.  It's okay -- it will mean I have to start the scene ffrom scratch, but that's probably appropriate, if more time-consuming.

Also, the world is ending tomorrow.  Happy Solstice!

Odd Bird, That One

Hi -

Well, "Frazzled" is DONE.

Yay!!!

That scene made me really nervous because, as I"ve said 3,000 times, we had to shoot it over two days and it was really emotionally intense. That was the one I had even tried to farm out to someone else, but now I have DONE IT!  Woo-hoo!

And what's more, I also have done Scene 47.

In Scene 47, Marissa is wearing almost all red, indicating that she is now feeling good and open and powerful.  She's getting it together!  She's also writing and she doesn't look like a something the cat wouldn't even drag in.  Bill comes in behind her, as he does in an earlier scene, but unlike in the earlier scene, he does not startle her.  She is nonplussed.  Why?  Because she's calm.  Because it's three-quarters of the way through the movie, that's why! 

This is the scene where Marissa says that Amy is "an odd bird, that one" and Bill responds by saying, "Watch your mouth" (also a reference to an earlier scene when the two are discussing Marissa's use of the expression "I'm just a bad penny"). 

The scene itself, we might say, is "an odd bird" -- For one thing, the coverage is terrible, and what there is, let's say, is not the way I would set it up now.  The one WS is just downright weird.  There's way too much negative space!  (oo - will have to put that and "coverage" in my glossary)  It's so weird that I think I must have been doing it intentionally for some artistic reason that is now lost.  I'm trying to analyze it and figure out what I would have been thinking if I had been me.  :)  Regardless, we crossed that DAMN 180 LINE again -- annnnd you can see Jenny & Mark's kitchen through the doorway as plain as day, which really kind of stinks because the Jenkins' kitchen is where we shot Bill's kitchen.  We didn't shoot in Jenny & Mark's kitchen at all.  Hmph.  I cut around it pretty well, I think.  Maybe we can just pretend it's a pantry on the way to the kitchen. 

This was also the scene where we wanted to show Marissa dropping a piece of paper, which would then float to a very specific place onthe floor where Sarah finds it in the next scene.  We stopped numbering the takes after a while.  I'd guess... 20?  

After several different versions, trying to cut around the kitchen and the weird framing and the jump over the 180 line, I think I have ended up with an okay rough cut of it.  A challenge MET!

Now I move into the hard stuff:  Sarah and Amy reading aloud, "That man is on crack," and the Showdown!