05.30.07
Posted in Life at 12:14 am by Rob Schultz
So I recently acquired the bag of Starburst™ Original Fruit Chews that you might have guessed had to be out there somewhere. Every bag of said candies you’ve ever gotten has had a disproportionately high quantity of lemon, right? It’s because they were cribbing from bags like this one, with only five or so lemon total. They almost become a treat in that situation.
Additionally, the bag of chicken contained exclusively pieces good for baking and enjoying, with none of the blobby, hard-to-cook-evenly-through chunks that I usually save for noodle dishes. And this ice cream before me contains a level of cookie that is reminescent of how the marketing folks would like you to think of the cheesiness-level of a bag of Cheetos™: Dangerous!
With all of this extremely mild good fortune getting spent on food items, one wonders what’s around the bend. Oh. Of course. More editing. (And health problems! I’ve been fueling this edit with sweets I haven’t had in a while..)
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05.27.07
Posted in Life at 11:13 pm by Rob Schultz
…that’s mc chris.
Time that I could have spent editing this feature film was spent visiting the UCB for Sunday night ASSSSCAT. I showed up early and got a worse place in the line than usual. This leads one to surmise that the show had either gotten a recent writeup in a newspaper somewhere, or that someone famous was the guest monologist. The latter, it turns out.
Spent the hour outside chatting with a woman who looked rather like Audrey Raines, but probably wasn’t. Spent the hour and a half inside enjoying a really packed show. At least 1/3 of the crowd was there because mc tipped ‘em off, and there were nine (count ‘em!) players in addition to their guest. They seemed to be having a really good time too.
For the crowd participation bit, I gave in the form of a random non-drug item, as I often do. Tonight it was a copy of Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick for the PS2. It ended up in mc chris’s very wealthy mitts. Well, really it ended up in the purse of the woman sitting next to me, evidently a friend of his. I could have saved time and passed it to her, I guess.
So it goes….and back to the edits…past the hour barrier and beyond!
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05.22.07
Posted in Work at 7:47 pm by Rob Schultz
(luckily, I copied this to the clipboard before posting, because the internets here have sucked so powerfully the past few days…)
So we shot through the weekend. Directed more b-unit stuff (secretly just A-unit working unpaid overtime) on Sunday. At some point chunks of crew passed the ‘let’s make a good film’ mindset on their way to the ‘let’s go home now’ mindset. I understand that the more hours they work they less they get per hour on a show like this, but why not do a respectable job, especially on the last day?
The flip side of that is feeling faintly like a sucker for being so concerned and runnng around the set rallying and fixing things when it’s not my film and not my job to do so. But I have, and although I couldn’t stop the film’s action setpieces from being turned into cutaways, hopefully they are better cutaways and more accurate to the previously shot dialogue that describes them.
Remember how filmmaking is like going to camp? Further evidence of this is in the in-jokes and quotes, some of which undoubtedly echo with slight variations at lots of similar camps/movies. To this end, I offer “El Pollo Loco is how a movie says it doesn’t love you anymore.” I went to one such restaurant once, and it seemed to be a taco bell-like fast foodery. But on sets it is represented as tubs of foul fowl, slaw, thoroughly frozen and steamed vegetables, and of course soft tortilla shells/wraps that serve no obvious purpose.
And as long as I’m putting off editing a bit longer, I might point out that I just saw some of TV’s Bill Maher. Strikingly unfunny individual. At least on his own show. Loves a good pander though. Now back to syncing audio…
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Posted in Comedy Jokes, Life at 7:45 pm by Rob Schultz
Double-posting to my own site would be extremely embarrassing. But that’s not what’s happened here. No sir.
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05.19.07
Posted in Work at 1:34 am by Rob Schultz
That’s Creative Utility Player. That’s me.
I’m editing the feature film Seducing Spirits. Wednesday I wrote three scenes and today I was directing second unit. In a 1-hour round trip, we shot 20 minutes worth, and got about as many setups as the first unit got all day. Sure, it’s exterior, no lighting, but it’s fast and hopefully good looking.
Also found that this company’s next feature begins principal in early August – looks like I’ll manage to stay employed for a while.
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05.17.07
Posted in Life at 1:49 am by Rob Schultz
Okay, so…still editing, though just about done with a rough cut of what’s been shot so far. Lots of story meetings taking place now, oddly enough.
Today I wrote six pages of the movie. I wonder if I’ll get to take a stab at directing a scene this weekend. That might be fun.
Daveed is taking a wife. Seems reasonable, yet still surprising.
And I would like to finally welcome Billy, Forsback, Lade, Lillehammer, Karsten, Dinge, Femton, Gilda, and Plastis
And tomorrow’s my day off. I think I’ll relax by driving down to Diamond Bar and hashing out story threads of this movie we’re shooting/editing/plotting this weekend.
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05.13.07
Posted in Life at 2:31 am by Rob Schultz
I want to win. That means I’ll have to do more. But it’d be worth it. To win.
And no matter how badly things went along the way, I’d still never be the Gazillionaire.
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05.12.07
Posted in Movies at 4:04 pm by Rob Schultz
So I did get that on-set editing job aformentioned. If you’re making a more-or-less straightforward drama, or comedy – something with self-contained scenes – let’s say, having the ability to pull in your footage from P2 cards and cut a scene together while on location is probably a pretty useful option. If your movie is all about the flashbacks and quick cuts of scenes to be filmed at the end of your shooting schedule…well, not as much.
It did turn out to be useful, since checking the daily footage did reveal problems in the rental gear, and I got a head start on the assistant-type duties. No shots that I deemed missing ever made their way into the schedule, and for a thriller like we’re making here I might as well have had tapes delivered to me at the end of the day or end of shoot.
I suppose I won’t say much about the movie itself, except that it’s a kind of thriller / murder mystery (the type of thing you might not be surprised to see Ashley Judd in, for instance) with some good character actors you recognize but might not know by name. My part is to try and tell a story with the footage shot, which so far is something of a departure from the script.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the last seventeen consecutive days. Managing and thoroughly backing up the data recorded on set and now chopping it all to little bits. I’ve been able to arrange now to be permitted to work on this from my apartment instead of from a dining room table an hour’s drive away, for which I’m grateful, and I managed to get yesterday off, which is also pretty great. Last week, while shooting was still in progress, I got to the 6:40AM screening of Spider-Man 3 in the Cinerama dome (general thumbs up. 2>3>1, and ends in a suitably dark place that would let me happily throw out part 1 and make this the middle film of a trilogy.) but yesterday was a full fledged no-work, catch up on the rest of life kind of day.
Part of that day was spent on the 1975 film Overlord, which is a lot like those verses of the Illiad that describe in great detail the lineage and property and heirs and favorite meals of a given greek soldier before informing us that he died. In this case, an especially hapless briton that never saw Sword. It also includes stock footage of the truly amazing Panjandrum.
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