Watching Patch Rug

I got this rug for my office space while in residence in Michigan, made by another resident artist, Rose Beerhorst. Visit her etsy page here.

Musical Chairs Outline Days 6 - 9

I finished the outline for "Musical Chairs" in a series of beautiful days in Michigan, typically the first half of the day being productive, and the second half being idyllic. I wasn't blogging much because they were full days, so here's a recap...

Here's the remainder photocopies:




I finished handwriting it on day 7. Handwriting a piece is something I haven't done in a long time, so I was surprised when it took me almost all of day 8 to type and edit it. 



Then I made a painted and bound cover for it for them to keep at the Shared Space Studio in Pentwater, Michigan. Big thank you to Eliza Fernand for giving me the opportunity to write this there. Everyone was great and I had the best time. Ironic that I ended up writing the darkest, strangest thing I'll ever write in such a nice setting!

Musical Chairs Outline Day 5

Day 5. I did four units today since yesterday went well and want more time for editing what I'm writing at the end of the residency. Went across the highway to get some milk at the gas station and saw this sign:



Which was uncanny since Musical Chairs is about a missing dog. I talked to a woman about Brutus, her neighbor's dog. Finished today's quota at the beach.

Musical Chairs Outline Day 4

Day 4. Had to double my quota because of all the hanging out I did on Day 3. Felt really good about the work I did. Then I cooked dinner for everyone here. Also discovered that at the end of my usual meditative walk to the nearby garbage dump, a nice but relatively boring little walk, there is a gate that I thought said "No Trespassing" but actually says "No Parking." So I trespassed. It's a very long beautiful walk into the woods. I had to turn back because I had no idea where I'd end up and had to get back to writing.

Day 3

Today was so beautiful we were all like "What the darn heck". I didn't meet my daily quota. Musical Chairs can wait. I was supposed to write some pretty dark scenes today. But instead Amanda and I got tattoos from Jeff. I never got a tattoo before. It's a Bauhaus music composition by Heinrich Siegfried Bormann, she got the first bar of the music, and I the second.




Here's Rose running toward the sun. We never saw her again.

Musical Chairs Outline Day 2

Day two. Really nice weather here in Michigan. It was a good day for discipline because I didn't feel like writing at all yesterday but met my daily quota anyway and wrote some pretty ok material. Especially the bike sequence. Because of the description of this residency I thought I'd be roughing it, but I'm not. Below is the view from the deck just outside my room. I wish I could photograph the moonlight on this lake but its impossible. You can't see it in pictures.

Musical Chairs Outline Day One

Day one. It was a little hard to adapt a photo of two men at pay phones with newspapers into a story about contemporary lives. Luckily there's no internet, so all I do is read and write at the studio, and interact with the other people working there. At one point we all took a break to visit a nearby petting zoo where the camel, Jeffery, was celebrating his 7th birthday. I liked petting the camel and all, but a petting zoo is still a zoo, and all zoos are sad places.

Summer update #3

Taking a much-needed vacation from editing the film "Speed of Sound" to do a residency in Pentwater, Michigan. I leave really early tomorrow morning and its a really long flight from the west coast to Grand Rapids. There were originally going to be four editors on the film, but I did the first scene and just kept going forward like a wild man. Now Chy Chi is editing the penultimate scene, and I'm editing the final scene when I get back. Then moving on to scoring with Matt Pomykalski, the sound mix, and color correction. The perks are almost ready from the crowd source campaign but I won't be getting to that again until I get back on the 26th of this month. The video embedded below was put together for Matt, using Bernard Herrmann music as a scratch track. It's a rough cut of the tennis sequence in "Speed of Sound".

Hopefully I'll be able to blog in Michigan. The residency is sort of process-based, since I'll be sharing my process with artists of other fields. I'm going to use this time to write my next script, called "Musical Chairs", which has a unique process based on photocopies from 60's/70's Swedish films. I'd like to share it here too!

SOS Still of the day 8/15

Jacques Rivette, Le veilleur -- by Claire Denis

Jim Henson's Red Diamond Coffee Commercials

Summer Update #2

Can we get some bad weather in Seattle, please? I'm getting fed up with having to put all the blinds down in order to focus on editing. Thanks God. 

Very close to being done with the edit. 

SOS Still of the day 8/6

SOS Still of the day 8/5

Printing Perks

Getting the perks together for the crowd source campaign for "Speed of Sound". Here's the DVD's for my short films, linoleum printing on discs by Ryan Moblo and sleeves by me.