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.

Actually this whole weekend has been a little unnerving. One of the primary investors is being hit hard by the current economy, and may be pulling out of the project. Which, with three and a half weeks to go, will introduce a serious complication. LOL
Of course, that was always one of the main points of 23E Studios, to devise a project so ambitious it could only fail, and then find a way to make it succeed.
I meet with that investor today to talk.
Then I begin improvising. As deflated as I feel fearing this is coming, I must say I’m also a little excited. Up until now everything has gone so smoothly…
Too smoothly. The film was going to be boring.

Another aspect of the unnerving weekend was that our potential architectural model maker leaves town on the 22nd of June. And he can’t give me a bid, let alone start building, until I get some measurements from a crew member, who hasn’t had a chance to get the measurements from her studio. So, over the last few days I’ve been watching the narrow window of opportunity for the architectural model close. Which, given that this afternoon we could conceivably lose half of the remaining money I was expecting, is probably for the best.

Our press release and other promotional materials that were supposed to be finished this weekend, are all tardy. So, those deadlines have been on my mind a lot, too.

Having said that, we’re now in a place where the project is simply unstoppable. And this is really the part of the project that is most thrilling for me, being caught up in something that is beyond control. The next few weeks can be nothing but pure improvisation. I get to live my art the way I play my music, by the seat of my pants; constantly adjusting to my partners and peers; sometimes leading or throwing out a riff we all ride, other times having to change direction on a dime when they introduce a new line. It’s probably a poor metaphor, but that is one of the ways I think about Disembody - it is one of my compositions, but the sound is spread out over the course of a year, impossible to hear with human senses and on a human time-scale.

I used to compose works that required performing acts of sound throughout a day or a week or a year. All the while recording my life, sometimes around the clock for weeks. Those recordings were then compressed to discover the rhythms inherent, or to find the composition of the sound acts within the music of my life.
Disembody is very much like one of those compositions, except this time our final product is a film. And this time it is a piece of music improvised by an orchestra of my closest friends, as opposed to being a solo work within the orchestra of my life.

Disembody is a unique feeling. There’s a wonderfully complex and seemingly contradictory feeling I get (and I think many performers do) before playing music with people. The mix of fear and excitement, feeding each other, hopped-up nerves. It’s a great feeling, really addictive.
Normally I have that feeling in the hours leading up to a performance or a studio session.
But for the last few weeks I’ve had that sensation coursing though my days and nights. It comes in waves. But I’ve never had it so regularly, so frequently before.
Except maybe on my first oRSo tour, when I’d get it before the show each night.
Except now I get it at the most random times. It’s strange how trepidation and fear can be so addictive and thrilling.

Anyway, the past three days I’ve experienced a very heightened sense of deflation mixed with the thrill of having to overcome a challenge.

So, having talked about the things not going right, let me mention that they are greatly outweighed by things going right. Stel and I met last night and he is bringing a couple of eight port gigabit switches so we can set up a solid network in the gallery. As well, he’s bringing several wireless access points. And he came up with a simple and reliable way to pull off the ending of the film, that doesn’t require a video switcher.
Phil and Libby are both raring to go on the project now that their wedding is behind them.
All of my crew members blow me away with their dedication and skills. Erin and Jonny have worked tirelessly on the website (our main promotional tool), posters, the confessional, screen printing, the arcade and a ton of other aspects; Amy is bending over backwards trying to help find funding and food donations; Carol-Anne and Keturah are spending hundreds of hours creating the interior design and all of its elements; Carson and Ted and David are all working on the build out; marcella, elise, Alex and Skye are pooling their resources to fashion an incredibly organized and efficient shoot; Hanif, Han and Ote are all working to make the promotion and conceit of the project as broad but focused as possible. Janet and Arthur are going far beyond the call of nepotism in accommodating all my demands and desires. And Susan, of course, is simply mind-blowing in her openness to letting us do whatever we dream up.

So, all in all, despite missed deadlines and a few setbacks, I find my spirits remain high. I’ll weigh in again after I meet with the investor. Maybe I’ll even have news on how we’ll need to rejigger the project to accommodate such a substantial loss.

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.

I came over here to work on a model to photograph for the model maker. But was distracted by champagne, beer and liqueurs.

Now we’re waiting for Jonny to get here. We’re transferring video from Skye’s external drive to elise’s. Making of footage for them to peruse in preparation for the film. We’re also listening to horoscopes.