Yeah, I was supposed to update you a few days ago. Traveling and a busy week have kept me offline a bit.

The good news is that the investor concern of my last post was resolved. The investor is Stel, a dear friend of many years. He was hoping to have money available to invest. Money, that is, on top of his labor the week of the show, his travel expenses which he’s paying himself, and tons of equipment (including the projector and multiple computers) which he is loaning. However, he does not have ready cash right now.

What he does have is a line of credit he has made available to me. This is pretty frakking dodgy territory, borrowing from a friend to make this happen, but it’s necessary. And Stel and I are both confident we can do this without wrecking the friendship. So…

Actually, knowing that the money to pull the project off is coming this way is all the more pressure to stay within budget. Because the last thing I want is to have to ask Stel for more than we discussed already.

Good news on that front, Jake Lee High, a frakking genius artist, programmer and architect, and close friend of Susan’s, is making an architectural model for us for $1000 this weekend. How amazing is that!
This morning I picked up video screens from Elise, and overnighted them to Jake. He is going to build the screen into the model so that it shows the actual film. RAD!!!!
And all affordably!

Also, through my friend Travis Meinolf, I was pointed at the fine folks at Howard Quinn. They do the newsprint calendars for a few theaters in SF. And they will do our theater calendar for a great price. So, now we have that lined up. Sooo exciting.
Of course, exciting for me, less so perhaps for Erin, because she just finished two amazing posters and two amazing postcards, and now I’m throwing an 8 page fold out calendar/catalogue at her.

Plus she is teaching Jonny how to screen print so he can make the candy boxes. Which, of course, she’ll be helping design…

Jonny is also working on our arcade game. And found two other arcade games he is dying to include in the arcade. So the current plan is to try and build three 3/4 size arcade machines with these three games.
LOL
We’re fools in the best way!
Jonny also has the cameras streaming and the timelapse working. And I understand he’s got the switch for the confessional smoothed out, too.

Amy’s mom sent out an email today asking her many contacts in the film world to consider investing in or making in kind donations to the project. So hopefully that will lead to some good news.

The last two days I’ve spent the afternoons printing out posters for Disembody. And a poster for another 23E production, KR-3.

This morning I had a long phone meeting with our lead contractor, David. And tonight I meet with Ted, our architectural designer. Sadly, between us we can not seem to find a single hour when we’re all free to meet together. This is super fucking lame. But it is a fact. So, I’m meeting with folks individually and trying to coordinate. I’d say it makes every aspect of the build at this stage take about four or five times as time consuming.
Good thing this is my entire life.

Stel and Alex and Jonny are currently talking about the network situ and how we’ll do the final editing of the film during the actual premiere. I think Stel came up with a very graceful solution.

Last night Alex and Carol-Anne and Carson and Keturah and I met. The tiles are looking amazing. The ceiling is going to be quite something. The chandeliers arrived, and we’ll see them Saturday. We’ll also be picking up a bunch of molding for the ceiling Saturday.

Kathryn finished the body of my usher’s jacket last week. And we did a final fitting the other day. I think the sleeves went on yesterday, so I may have a complete uniform to show you by week’s end!

So, yup, busy. Exactly the way it should be with less than three weeks to the start of install.

Well, here’s the skinny today:

Chantal, my 16 year old niece bailed this morning. She was going to be an usherette, however her Summer is not going as planned. This is sad news, but not, prehaps, bad news. I have the sneaking suspicion the theater was going to be overstaffed with three employees…
Plus we were a yard short of material before this. I was going to have shorts as opposed to proper long pants for my uniform. Now I’ll have the long pants.

I spoke with Amy this morning, her endeavors to find food in exchange for promotion are not going well. That is no surprise. Though it is disappointing. We may be eating a lot of bread and butter sandwiches. LOL.

Janet sent me the final contracts this morning. So, I’ll have those for my trip to Chicago Friday, and SF next Tuesday.

My production assistant, Arthur, set the wheels in motion today to get parking stickers and permits for July, so we’ll be able to house the vehicles that deliver ten people to my folks’ home (where 2/3 of the crew are staying).

Jonny is uploading ephemera to the 23E ephemera library. I asked him to pick most of it (I suggested a few things I’d like to see up there). I think the archive, like everything else on the project, will be more exciting if I’m not micro-managing it. It is fascinating to me to see the project through other peoples’ eyes.

Spoke to Ali, and she’ll be starting the hoodies for the crew next week.

Also spoke to Carson, and sched’ed a build meeting for next Tuesday night, and a full crew meeting for Thursday. The full meeting will coincide with his birthday, and be a meeting/party.

Alex and I have been emailing all morning discussing how we’re going to capture sound. We’re struggling with finding wireless lavaliers we can afford to rent. But they are not an item we can really forego, we think.

Finally, a potential investor out of NYC offered his regrets today. This is not the best economic climate for convincing people to risk money on an independently produced artwork/art film. LOL. Fortunately, we have all we need now. Everything from here on out is gravy (of course, the kind of gravy that makes architectural models and other important elements possible…)

Yup, five weeks from today we will be opening at Fringe Exhibitions in Chinatown. I don’t think I can describe how I feel right now, but it’s a mix of fear and exhilaration. It’s a lot like the mix of sensations that accompanies a live performance with SPP or oRSo. Except that feeling starts a few hours before a gig, at most. Five weeks out is a bit much. LOL. I can’t even imagine what kind of terror/glee rush I’m going to be riding over the next five weeks. It should be good.

Jonny went home yesterday. But only after making his second pilgrimage, this time to dip his fingers into the ancient muck that made Los Angeles the mind bogglingly wonderful city it is today - black gold.

Or maybe I exaggerate, but Jonny really did enjoy the La Brea tar pits, I think. It’s one of my favorite places in L.A. so I was overjoyed to take him there.

The week he was here we accomplished a lot. We got the wiki up (though it’s still not quite ready for prime time). We got the internet archive library started. We got the ephemera page started. We found some bugs in the confessional setup. We established that the time lapse will work. And we began the work flow list for video production.
We also discussed a couple other projects which we may be able to announce on the blog in the coming days.

After Jonny left I had lunch with Amy who is finding investors for the production. As well, she is trying to find restaurants, markets, cafes and bakeries who will provide food and drink during the production in exchange for promotion in the film and catalogues. They can write it off against their ad budgets. So far no luck.

Next week I’ll be hitting a couple hardware stores to try and get building materials in exchange for promotion.

Today Janet and I went over the contracts. I think we’re finally finished with the crew deal memo, the senior investor contract, and standard investor contract.

In SF, I believe today was the day Alex, elise, marcella and Skye were meeting to establish the video production protocol: work flow, responsibilities, shoot style, logging method, etc.

I wrote the newsletter and created a 200 strong email list for promotion. I’m working on the archive and website this evening.

Last Saturday was a strange night. Jonny died on his way to Berkley. His body was smashed into the beams of the bay bridge when he fell asleep at the wheel of his uncles honda prelude. He didn’t realize he was dead. He showed up a bit late, and it was a little awkward for a little while because Skye didn’t know if Jonny knew that he was dead or not, and didn’t want to say anything to suggest anything out of the ordinary. Alex was a little freaked out, so I made up a reason for why we should all leave. Since we had been drinking before jonny showed up none of us were in any condition to drive his wreck of a car back to SF. As it turned out Jonny drove me back to SF. While heading over the bridge I saw jonny’s body being lifted in to an ambulance. I would not have known who it was on the gurney since the body was so disfigured, but I haven’t seen anyone else wear those particular blue pants with reflective silver stripes besides the now disembodied jonny.

Sunday Jonny and I drove from SF to LA. We recorded a great deal of video for the Making Of. None, sadly, as entertaining as Keturah and Carol-Anne’s. But we did stop at Wal-Mart and eat at Popeye’s.

Monday we had a very productive day. We wound down the evening watching Tristram Shandy. Films about filmmaking make up a great deal of my current viewing. Not surprising, I suppose. I’ve three documentaries waiting for me right now.

Before that we made a flow chart, summed up below by Jonny:

on the life of a tape

* cinematographer records footage with camera, & logs on paper as she shoots
* cinematographer logs footage into FCP at logging/capture station
* cinematographer batches capture footage to her external shuttle hard drive (each cinematographer has her own shuttle hd) & cinematographer returns to recording footage & logging
* shuttle hd is picked up by editor
* editor copies footage from shuttle drive
* editor returns drive to capture station
* editor edits and creates dailies (by end of each day)
* editor copies dailies (as rendered DV) to internet pusher’s hd unit and at that time copies confessional files from pusher’s hd unit
* internet pusher re-encodes dailies for web and uploads to Internet Archive during evening
* basic meta data (such as title) is added to archive
* dailies get shown (each morning)
* meta data re-visited
Later on Lee captures all of the tapes and loads the dv files on to the archive.org

We also got the webcams working and the time lapse and sent a few stills off from a crappy cam (for the build we’ll be using much higher res cams) to Skye who made a short time lapse for us.



An ad in two sizes (half and full page) was sent off to Susan, who is running ads for a show for the first time, which is very exciting. There was a good deal of discussion about the ad. Jonny and Erin and I belabored different designs for quite some time, debating the efficacy of including some in-jokes in quotes, as if they were reviewer or critic commentary. In the end we dropped them from the ad. As well, Skye and I spoke at length about the ads, which he felt were rather slick compared with what the production will actually look like. I suspect he is right on that account. But they are not so far from the look I envisioned for them, nor from the feel I wanted to aim for, recognizing that some, perhaps all, elements of the production would fall short. And that in so doing, might turn out far more exciting than anything I could intentionally create.

Jonny made a list of things that scare him on Monday, as well:

DSL modem at gallery denying inbound traffic; video stretching at Archive; uncompressed time lapse images being unimportable into FCP; the confession booth switch.

And a list of to do while here:

upload to archive, and get it looking slick; get the wiki encyclopedia up and running; get the catalogue conceived.

I added getting a flowchart for the confessional.

We visited Fringe Monday; ended up spending about 3 hours there. The upload and download speeds were poor. But Susan is upgrading, and at worst what we encountered was still doable. It’ll just take Jonny longer to get files up. The streaming of 4 webcams however, was going to be a problem. We cut back to two webcams, both upstairs capturing the wall going up. And once we get into the gallery on July 8th we’ll tackle the question of the modem/router, which may simply refuse to accommodate any webcams. Which won’t be the end of the world.

We established that the wireless router I had hoped to use is unusable. So, I’ll need to get a wireless router from somewhere.

Oh! Interruption! Marcella just informed me that my Odd Nerdrum book sold on ebay for $115, so, that means that the $120.50 over budget we went this morning after getting Keturah’s latest materials list, is almost negated.

Crap! This is a long blog. Bad form.

Tuesday Jonny and I went to Sun Valley. And an overwhelming electronics part shop, Apex Surplus. We picked up several proximity switches each. And were simply overwhelmed.

We spent the evening working on the confessional switch. Jonny has a proximity switch triggering a laptop to record from a Digital8 DV camera. And we’ll have a little “recording” sign when recording is happening. And hopefully a small monitor so people can see themselves in the booth. The switch took a bit to work out, but it is mostly working right now. Jonny needs to take it home and work out a bug that stops the capture in the computer program if the switch is engaged and then disengaged too quickly.

This morning I spoke with Susan. I think she is going to put a half page ad in Artillery. Which is super cool. Just having an ad is pretty hilarious. Once again, this is the sort of thing I didn’t really expect. I keep being surprised when people give me what I want rather than telling me I’m ridiculous.

As well, she put me in touch with Jake, who may make our architectural model. If I have any budget for it. Eeek.

We’re meeting up with Amy today to talk about investments and craft services donations.