tarnished goldfish

Took a week off work to sleep on the floor in Poughkeepsie, producing a short for a professor friend with a bunch of newly minted Vassar grads

Rather than make call sheets (oh, there's plenty of time for that, ladies&gents!) I wanna talk about FEEEEELINGS

(I ALWAYS want to talk about feelings. This is nothing new.)

It is a positive adrenaline shot to be back in production mode after almost exactly a year on hiatus. There's something wonderfully raw about academic indie film making, although The Fishbowl doesn't neatly fit into either category. Technically this isn't a film school movie, because it's not being done through the department and we've only 2 undergrads working with us. It's not quite independent, because we're still keeping our fingers crossed that the dean's office/department will reimburse some/all of the costs. But what is independent, and what I love most about independent film, is the spirit of all of the participants-- everyone's doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and the love of the medium.

James Roehl has written a modest, sincere script that reminds me what's hidden and lovely about being in your midtwenties and being able to appreciate that. He wrote The Fishbowl based on his weekend at RISD a few years ago and workshopped it in Kathleen (my one true professor love)'s class last fall. When it came time for picking narratives, his only got one vote, and it wasn't his own. As the year wound down Kathleen, still touched by sincerity in the face of student film's bombastic, bloody endings, resurrected the idea. James found his one remaining copy of the script, under his bed and muddied by footprints, and together they resurrected it and got eight of us together for a week to make a little movie that could.

My forever partner in crime Katie has been lassoed in as assistant camera, but has been acting as a phenomenal AD for the past 2 days. From day one (literally, freshman year when we both showed up as prospective film/psych double majors and discussed this in the elevator) I've always had Katie as my creative sounding board. Now it's double happiness to have her here to hang out and make art for a week, because emotionally we're on the same playing field-- we've already sorted out the post grad world, and gone through the emotional tumult of being freshly graduated and scared shitless and numb as a coping mechanism because the rug holding everything we knew had just been yanked out from under us. As the only two such folk for whom the rug pulling did not transpire THIS MORNING, it's nice to have a metered, reasonable ally whose company I can safely say I enjoy more than almost anyone else's.

Oh man, the day after graduation. I think I just cried a little bit for a solid week. I can't even imagine how the rest of the crew is even functioning well enough to MAKE AN EQUIPMENT LIST or CONTACT POUGHKEEPSIE PUBLIC TRANSPORT when they've moved 4 years of their lives into their cars for the night, postponing the uncertainty for just one more week to make this movie. There is comfort in the familiarity of production, it breathes a certain way and you get used to the rhythms. Hopefully we can keep everyone so busy that at the end of the week their heads fall off and they can just then remember that the world is mighty uncertain.

Kathleen deserves her own blog entry or an entire blog of adulation because she's such a person. I'm not even sure how i'm processing everything that's going on here but in the span of a year we've gone from an incredible professor-student relationship to something that's not as clearly defined but marvelous in its ambiguity. Such a person. such a person. Fascinating and endlessly impressive and definitely the type of woman I was praying for when she came to the Junior film screenings at the end of 2007-- I wanted to write her an email then and say- HI can you teach me how to do this as a lady? I learn from her every day, and the staying a lady part most of all.

I'm going off an emotional deep end, which means I should go back to menial tasks like finding suitable costumes and scheduling trainrides. My late night concern at this moment are our animal actors, the four goldfish we got today for the shoot that'll have to brave the metro north to come home with me on Friday. As yet unnamed, in the tank at the Petco they were brilliant, actually golden beans. Now they just look hungry and tarnished. We got 4 to have 2 backups/stunt doubles "should anything happen" over the week. I'm hoping they perk the fuck up before their star turn on wednesday.

MORE ON THAT LATER!