THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 1999

We’re getting close to the end now. Or so it seems. Viet will join me in the edit room and Tuesday and we will finish up all the action scenes. I was thinking to have a sit down with Scott Rhodes and go through the film and see what he thinks about the edit job. I think constructive criticism is a good thing. When someone expresses an opinion it makes me think about why I did things the way you did. It forces me to defend my actions and sometime see things that I had overlooked. I’ve found that the process can be enlightening (or frustrating).

The KXAN job is going well. We will meet on Monday to discuss next weeks shoot and, I assume, the possibility of taking a ride in the helicopter.

Viet called yesterday and asked me to be his Director of Photography the feature he plans to shoot this summer. We talked about the shoot and the story and the look and crap and then he offered $50 a day for twenty days and I took the job.

It’s obviously not about the money, I’ve been wanting to shoot a feature for some time. I’m looking forward to being able to concentrate on the camera and lighting without having to answer a million question from a million different people. I think the experience will be liberating. I was thinking to ask Richard McIntosh if he’d like to come along for the ride as 1^st AC.

If all goes well, I would like to direct and DP my next film in the fall. Perhaps a zombie flick.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 1999

Well I certainly feel like a dip shit today. It turns out that the film that both Barna and I thought was lost by the funky Hungarian himself was actually sitting in my brother’s refrigerator the whole time. I have to take all the blame on this one. Apparently I had asked brother Dave to let us store the short ends in his refrigerator, including the super 8 stuff which contained the supposed missing scenes. I just spaced it out completely. Dumbass.

I’m sure as hell glad that the film turned up. I wasn’t looking forward to re-shooting those scenes. The only problem remaining is that I don’t know if any of the Tourettes scene is in focus. We used a fisheye lens for that scene and I noticed that some of the other scenes we had shot using this lens were a bit out of focus in low light situations. We might need to re-shoot the Tourettes stuff anyway. While I’m at it, I might as well re-shoot the little girl entering the laundry mat and screaming, because the boom is in the better of the two takes we have right now.

The Bates Motel is closing down. Another sad loss for the Austin underground music scene. I guess I won’t be filming there again. I went to see Voltage last night and all the signs and half the mirrors are gone. There were two lights on in the bar and it was dark. People were running into each other and tripping over chairs in the darkness. The small lights that were on seemed to always be stabbing you in the eye, making seeing even more difficult. I gotta admit though, it looked pretty cool, dark silhouettes outlined with a sliver of back light on one side and blackness everywhere else.