the secrets of my success
Three of the many things that made this weekend go so well: Rye whiskey, writing, and playing with photography.
It was a good weekend for a lot of reasons, actually. The truth is, it was my best in a long time, as weekends go, and I feel old enough and wise enough (read: jaded enough and lonely enough) to not pick apart every little thing. Time spent with an ex, for example, was really very good, so why muddle that up by thinking about stuff? It is what it is, all of it. So fuck it.
In no particular order: I went hiking, I watched Moon, I managed to re-experience a once nice partnership without spoiling it, I drank rye, I played some board games with my family, I took photos (film! black and white! whoa!), I bought some good comics and some good movies (50% off Criterions are hard to turn down). I ate well some days, poorly others. I exercised muscles I hadn't in too long. I drove a lot. I purchased a photo-toying app for the iPhone and toyed with it, as you can see above. And I turned 5 pages of iffy material into 14 pages of iffy material, at least getting the momentum to properly move forward with Mexico. I know the pages so far are convoluted, choppy, short-changing the story's characterization for the sake of moving the plot forward, but it's structurally there and it lays out some of the missing scenes that kept befuddling me from moving into act two. I am one major hurtle from being able to write acts two and on, then come back and go, "Okay, so act one still sucks." And then I watched a neato documentary, For All Mankind, using NASA footage shot by the astronauts to depict the journey to the moon and back. (Shut up, Kelly, it's awesome!)
Anyway, I'm tired finally. I work tomorrow. That's lame.
Cassie's giving me files for Every Room is Empty, and I asked a fellow filmmaker I work with who does compositing all day if he'd help me do my one-shot title effects trickery, just to help make it look sexy. I need to figure out how to do closing credits, too. Then a couple of chops, some foleying of crowd sounds (and sweetening of dialogue, when possible) and I send the film out. Done and done, professionally mastered by someone who actually knows what he's doing this time. A dry run for Open.
If only every step didn't take so fucking long I'd be proud of myself right now.
But still, it was a good couple of days, on many levels. I'm not jumping off the walls at how beautiful the world is or anything, but I've been feeling more or less decent all weekend, and ain't nobody can take that away from me.