Late again

It's been a while since I posted, and I'm going to try and be better about it. Also, I've been trying to talk in generalities about the program, but I'm finding that more and more difficult. From now on the blog will probably be a more personal viewpoint and I can't say for certain it will really reflect everyone's experience, but it will be a more in depth look at My experience.

So some quick catch up. It's now the start of week four, and things are beginning to take off. I think just about everyone is feeling it since we were locked in for our first actual shooting projects.

As I mentioned previously, our directing class has a project where we have to shoot a scene from an already made film. My film is The Aviator. Last week we were assigned shooting weekends, either the 5th or 6th week of the program. I was given 5th week, meaning I have to shoot sometime over the weekend of the 27th of September.

As you can imagine, this lite a fire under many of us as the deadline was closer than first imagined. Most people, myself included, immediately had to get moving on the process. The first step has been to prepare auditions, which is basically, reserving a room on campus to hold the auditions, posting a casting call on one of various websites, and then scheduling actors to come in at the specific times you have reserved rooms. While not difficult, it is a little time consuming and requires a fair amount of organization to be clear on who is showing up to which audition at which time.

Personally, I'm doing a scene which is between Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn, which feels a bit odd to cast. When you post on one of these sites you have to describe the project as well as the characters, and to do that with Hughes and especially Hepburn was a little weird. Fortunately, I've had some response, and I hope at least a few work out.

The actual project is designed to be a real exercise. We aren't supposed to really worry about costumes, sets, etc. It's all about the acting and directing. We were even told that should the actor turn out to be not great for the role, that too would be a learning experience, so don't sweat it.

I've never auditioned anyone for anything. In fact, the opposite is true. I've always had to beg friends to be in my movies. So, I'm about as far as one can get from an experienced auditioner. I did help out a fellow classmate on Friday, and found the process to not be nearly as intense as I initially thought. I forgot that the basic setup of an audition is extremely skewed against the actor. All the pressure is on him/her to impress you, the director. They want to please you, they want to be in your project. As soon as people started coming in I immediately felt better about the whole process.

We'll see how my auditions go this week.

As far as other classes go, our 507 Production class has become 507 Editing class. Our new professor is a professional editor, he's done a bunch of David E. Kelley stuff, as well as Twin Peaks. The class itself is moving a bit slow, but outside of class we're editing a scene from Boston Legal, which has been very helpful. First off, it got us all into the Avid lab to pretty much learn Avid. I found myself taking to it faster than I thought, and now feel comfortable working on it for my future projects.

After editing the show, in partnerships, we had them brought into class and shown this Monday. It was interesting to see how certain areas are very similar and very dissimilar from group to group. It seems most of us have a natural sense of editing to some degree. Personally, my partnership worked extremely well. I was surprised; I assumed a partnership would slow down the editing process but I felt it sped up a considerable degree. I thing my partner and I were just lucky to be on the same page. We seemed to both agree whenever something didn't exactly work, and when I wouldn't know why she would often have a suggestion to fix it that worked out well, and vice versa.

Our professor gave us notes on our edited projects so we'll be altering them again this week. It should be significantly easier now. It's basically just minor tweaks here and there, lots of 'tightening' to do. It really gives you and insight into just how fast the cuts are on network TV. Look at older shows and you'll see a huge difference. We watched some scenes from Perry Mason (a personal favorite of mine) and you can see just how long the camera hangs on each take in comparison to the rapid cuts that are now common in any courtroom drama, or anything on TV for that matter.

There's lots more to tell, but I'm going to cut it short this time, in hopes that it'll spur me to write more often, and hopefully leave less out between posts.

I promise promise promise to put up syllabus for next post.