A little break

I decided to take a little break from everything to do with the project. I've been reading a pretty good book about editing wrote by the guy who edited Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. There's some good ideas.

I think...the target start date...is...Monday.

I've already looked at some of the footage, just while capturing it to the harddrive and there's already a few things that have me a little bit perturbed. Just details that we missed (two of them because I didn't have a widescreen monitor, and the third because I couldn't look at the shot while we were shooting it).

There's a whole lot that I've got buzzing around in the skull. It's a tad bit weird to seriously think about being a filmmaker, for income, with the entire financial system in this country potentially on the brink of collapse. I mean, if the entire house of cards collapses, what's that mean for the state of monies available to make films? I suppose the people escaped to their silent films during the last one, but today they've got their TV's to numb their minds. Oh well, I guess the only thing you can do is know that there are many different business models that can be taken with the internet and digital screening, etc. Maybe traveling showings. Lots to think about.

I've been thinking a lot about the next project, as I try and push "The Killers" out of my mind for a while. I've picked up 4 books that I'm going to be reading through while I edit: a new trasnlation of Grimm's Fairy Tales, a new translation of Aesop's fables, a book of the Marquis de Sade's short stories and a book of Samuel Beckett's short stories. I've also got Lewis Carroll's complete stories sitting on my shelf. I think I want to do some sort of really fantastical fairy tale, using the snow, the Michigan forests, the iced over rivers, and some of the other more interesting natural locale. I also would like to try and get down in those tunnels underneath the city. We'll see. As it stands now, if everything goes as I hope, I won't be leaving Michigan until January 2nd, so I've got 3 months to edit "The Killlers", write the next short, and shoot it. That's plenty of time, if I buckle down and use the writing process to take a break from the editing process, yet still keep the creative juices flowing (although I think I'm going to be doing a lot of painting throughout this). Trick with that is keeping the ideas seperate.

I've been reading a book of interviews with Stanley Kubrick and between that and looking over the footage, thinking about the shooting, I've come to the conclusion that the only way to ever achieve anything close to the success he was able to attain, is to develop a sharper mind, an even keener attention to detail and I need to shoot, shoot, shoot, until the actors drop from exhaustion. I'm sure Steve'll appreciate hearing that.