Beach Town update, daylight-savings edition

I got a lot done this week. Worked on the rest of the record store scenes, then on to the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall, and beyond that to our little scene on 1st Ave. S. near Slim's Last Chance.

A lot of locations on this film.

A lot!

You wanna know what one of the primary rules of indie filmmaking is? It's "limit your locations".

The process of packing up, moving, unpacking, and shooting over and over and over is costly, time-consuming, randomizing, and exhausting.

Limit your locations! It totally makes sense.

In a bean-counter sort of way.

But dammit, I love locations and I'm doing it the same way on my next film.

Locations are key to your mise-en-scène!  It's not "adding stress" to bring your cast and crew to places that inspire everyone and gives you beautiful images as well, it should be part of the expectation. That's Cinema, baby.

I do wonder sometimes, in the dark of the night, whether the I-know-better "punk rock" approach to filmmaking that I love so much maybe won't come out so charmingly rough-edged one day...

But this week? Once again, everything fell gloriously into place like I hoped it would.

Ha! Vindicated!

A bit 'o editing magic, it is. A little shell game, made possible by tons of pre-production planning, and then --- crucially -- by working with excellent actors and excellent crew.

I'm sure I'll have to eat my words some day in this regard, but what's the point of being in the arts if you have no conviction?

Anyway... Moving right along...

Now that we're getting close to the end of the rough cut, I've started getting distracted by the upcoming music phase of post production.

I need to reel back that distraction until the rough cut is done.

Last night, for example, I got a bee in my bonnet that I needed to figure out a particular piece of music right now, so I switched gears and tried to crank out a new brand new song -- with no real ideas per se and using kindergarten-level tools (re: apple Garageband) --  right there on the spot.

That was a big fat waste of time. But it did remind me that I'm gonna need to invest in one more (ahem) piece of software not too long from now....

In other news:  

The Criminal Element, written by Jennifer Dice and directed by Steven Sterne, at Seattle Public Theater this Saturday, March 15th, at noon. These Dice/Sterne plays are a blast, I highly recommend them. I'll be there, I hope to see you too.

And don't forget to Spring Ahead today.