Curtains

We had Curtain Call last night.

It doesn't mean that the show is over - there's still some more shooting to do and I've still got a week left and hope to shoot up until the day I leave - but...

I am trying not to unwind just yet, but I am so tired. I took the film to the lab last night, slept for a few hours and picked it up at 3pm. 11 rolls, 180 shots.  I'll total up the previous bit later, but I did get some nice stuff this weekend. A  bunch of that shooting was bracketing one series of shots. It was six frames, left to right of the main cast out front on stage. given the tricky lighting, I shot it four or five times at different exposures, so that's a bunch of stuff right there, for just one scene. In any event, there's plenty of material, enough to keep me busy for the next year, I suspect.

I didn't want to shoot that scene last night, because I was afraid that it would mean that this was over. It's a tricky business, symbolism, because on the one hand you can see alot, learn alot, and even effect some kind of sympathetic transformation, but on the other hand for that to work you do have to surrender some control. It's a collaboration, you and the work, and sometimes the end comes sooner than you'd hoped.

Still, I do have plenty to do between now and next Monday, so I am excited at the prospect of being past the three quarter mark, more or less.

I learned two valuable lessons in film school. The first one, I believe Sandra Davis said this one, was "Film is cheap". Now, anybody who has ever worked with film (and this was a class in 16mm Cinematography) knows full well that film isn't, ain't never been, and never will be, especially if you are broke and living in Tampa going to art school, cheap, but she was right. You never get a second chance to shoot what is in front of you. Not if you are alive and you are staring the world right in the face. You are better off shooting and shooting and shooting until they pull you away (to debtor's prison most likely) than you are regretting the money you've saved. I can attest to this.

The second lesson was from Sonya Maxwell (same class at USF actually) when I was finishing up my semester's film project. It was days before the end of year screening, for which my project was due, and I still wanted to go out and shoot more, before I could finish editing. She yelled at me (figuratively, nicely, well-meaningedly, coming-from-deep-wisdom-and-experience-hoping-I-would-listenedly) and told me that there was a time for gathering and a time for editing and I needed to learn when to do both. I made some fast cuts that I still regret and showed the film [This was back when you could still get the  4X B/W Reversal Stock in 16mm from Kodak. I loved that film. For those  of you listening in from home, reversal film was a motion-picture equivalent to slide film: once processed you could look at the original without having to pay for a copy print from the lab. That's good if you are studying film-making and have no money, bad if you have issues about cutting the original film up in a scramble to finish by some arbitrary deadline.] To this day -19 years later- that remains the only film I've completed, and I still agonize over the cuts I made in my haste and inexperience.

OK, so I didn't learn the lesson about when to stop gathering very well then, but maybe, maybe now it's working its magic. I can feel myself shift gears, making my preparations mentally for leaving. They say that the art of living is essentially learning the art of dying well. Another lesson I hope to learn, but am reluctant to hurry into. Meanwhile, I am exhausted, having spent the last month sleeping late and pushing myself onward with alcohol and caffeine. I wish you could see the work, but that'll have to wait until I get home and can set the scanner set up. Until then you'll have to take my word for it that the work is lovely. Some of it is. Whether it all holds together in the end, well that's another story but maybe Beauty is sufficient for now. Sometimes meaning gets lost when we try to hard to make it show itself. It can be quite shy.