New Digs!

That's right, we're moving in May 26th. Yeah! And that's our apartment building in the picture above.

As for the thesis...very excited. Have the first 4 minutes and the last 5 and a half minutes laid down. Today I'm working on the image for the middle section. Then the rest of the week will be mixing sound and fine tuning image. Then its time for a view of a first cut and meetings with Leighton and Sasha (committee members).

Getting so very close...

Distortions, Creative Liberties and Lameness

Spent most of the day going through the tapes we recorded when I was traveling with mom, grandma and diana shooting danville, greensboro and raleigh. It was draining to listen to them. Everyone was trying so hard in so many different ways and yet we were running into obstacles (some of memory, some of developmental changes in the layout of the cities). It wore on everyones nerves. Makes for good drama for the film, but leaves me feeling sad. Sad for how frustrated mom felt. Sad that grandma and Diana had to mediate. Sad that I put them through such a difficult experience. However, in the end everyone has said they appreciated being able to be on the trip. Seeing the locations meant a lot to them. I think its just taking these instances in isolation and listening to them out of context that is hard.

At any rate - as an interesting end to the day I went to see Capote with Andre, Kaspar and Sabine tonight. PSH was amazing I we all greatly enjoyed the film, but I left feeling yet even more overwhelmed by my thesis. Nonfiction is just a complicated beast. You don't want to exploit anyone, but its inevitable on some level and the "truth" never actually translates because once one person takes hold of the story it will be edited to their liking. Distortion, creative liberties, lame attempts at pretending to have answers...

Oh, its so time for Buffy.

A Love Hate Relationship

After the Gatten workshop I feel a mixture of emotions. Terrified about all the fix I inhaled in my twenties, apprehensive about ever handprocessing again and what it will mean to my body and the environment, and absolutely obsessed with developing my thesis titles and transitional footage on hi con. Its all such a contradiction and struggle. I need the look of film for this project, not video. The whole point was to shoot on film and transfer to video to underline the give and take between past and present. To have titles and images shot on video just doesn't work for this project. Luckily, David's method of processing is much less toxic and time consuming that what I've done in the past so this will be a short, but sweet end to my love affair. At least that's what my plan is for now.