you are always in my heart and on my mind

I am starting to do research for the documentary I will be shooting in December. I am going to make a documentary about the Protest Easy Guns (protesteasyguns.com) movement that was started by a concerned citizen in Northern Virginia after the Virginia Tech shootings.

Reading the stories and watching the videos, I have to say---this is going to be a tough project to get through, but I'm doing it for the right reasons.

It feels good to care about someone so much that it makes you care about some thing so much.

The difference between great people and everyone else 
is that great people create their lives actively, 
while everyone else is created by their lives, 
passively waiting to see where life takes them next. 
The difference between the two 
is the difference between living fully and just existing.
-Michael Gerber

the soul searching has begun

i think i put it off for a long time, inadvertently or accidentally, but it was put off and now it has begun. maybe because i am alone in more ways than one, i am in a new city, in a place i have always wanted to be and feels like the right place to me. maybe because i am doing what i want to do all the time, there are no more distractions. maybe because everything i want is so close, so graspable, becoming more plausible in reality and in my mind every day. in any case, i am changing or trying to change or thinking about how i have changed but haven't quite noticed it yet.

i'm remembering how to have fun again. i'm learning how to slow down and relax. i'm trying to fight off this shaking leg i've had my whole life, or at least understand what it means. i'm trying to eat better, sleep more, and interact with people. i'm trying to be balanced and healthy. being busy is not fun and not fulfilling, even if you are accomplishing and achieving a lot. being at the top is great but it gets lonely fast, as does the climb to the top. it feels great to find something you are decent at but know you can get better at with time and to know that you will be happy just working towards getting better at this one thing. i am learning that not reading every book, seeing every movie, or traveling to every place is not going to make my life poorer, but not taking the time to enjoy the one book, the one movie, or the one location will. it is the quality of the moments, not the quantity.

i am learning not to do things i don't want to. i am friendly and giving and kind but am learning to speak up when i feel taken advantage of. i am growing as an artist and a citizen. i am opening up and acknowledging that i am not quite as honest with how i feel as i used to be. walls were erected for protection, and now they need to be taken down. i need to write more, because i feel like i'm getting stupid. emails and text messages don't count. i am learning to hate computers and email. i have always hated talking on the phone. it's a love-hate relationship with each of them. i desire human contact, shared experiences, close friendship and companionship. past transgressions are slipping away and being replaced by a blank slate, a freshness and innocence. a forgiveness, possibly, or just a willingness to live again.

i try to walk slow. i try to look up at the sky and buildings. i try to not sit down at my computer to check my email every day when i wake up and every time i come home. my problem is my stomach aches with creativity and ambition and they are hard things to shoulder sometimes, especially when you are alone. but i have a love for life, a zest for everything and anything. an energy and appreciation for every moment, even the bad ones. this can lead me to feeling overwhelmed, to wanting to experience everything, wanting to write down every day's proceedings and photograph all my trips to create works of art that will outlive me and explain me. i want to learn things to tell my kids. i don't want to become a person who watches tv every night or be a bad father. i want to be in love again. and i want to win an oscar. but that can wait. and is negotiable. 

wow, all that just came out of me because i took a couple minutes to slow down and read a book in the park. i should probably do that more often...

i drank six beers last night

saw a really funny off-broadway musical last night called "Life After Bush."

i think it is being performed in other cities too between now and the election, so definitely look it up. it had bush, mccain, and obama characters and a whole bunch of others. it was kind of like a series of skits. one was about abortion and included an infomercial type skit for a place called "abortionland"--it was hilarious

i started a blog on a website called Tumblr to keep track of some of the great videos i have been finding recently. i guess i could have just put them on this blog...but i just thought that now and i already created the Tumblr blog, so check it out.

http://jase286.tumblr.com/

i put up two great political videos and one great music video that hits break ups right on the money.

movie update

Now that my MOS is shot (the footage is ready and I am picking it up on Saturday morning!) I have had time to catch up on some movies and have some recommendations/comments:

Nights and Weekends-devastating, honest film about relationships. Shot on miniDV, very minimalist, great vulnerable performances. The sound is too accurate--it got really annoying listening to characters swallowing and eating (Ex: chewing a banana)

W-great, absorbing, very sympathetic. I left feeling bad for Bush (isn't that sick?) It was a lot of fun to see a cast of different actors playing different Bush family members and different members of Bush's cabinet

The Elephant King-Beautiful, well directed but felt like a first draft of a screenplay. Horrible acting but was brimming with potential. So it wasn't bad...just not worth watching. Wait until the director makes a couple more movies.

Synecdoche, New York-Charlie Kaufman's new film. Hoffman is great as is Michelle Williams (I literally almost bumped into her outside my apartment last week and she smiled at me). Long, complicated, honest, funny, and sad. Not his best (Nothing beats Eternal Sunshine) but it was one of the most entertaining times I've had at the movies in awhile.

He Got Game-a Spike Lee joint made in the 90's. Beautifully shot, great Denzel performance and a tough father-son story. One of Spike's best.

Let The Right One In-A vampire movie from Sweden (?) about a lonely little boy who befriends a little girl that moves in next store to him who ends up being a vampire. Beautiful, every outdoor scene has tons of snow, slow moving, not inappropriately gory, not startling scary but haunting, and I have to say...the ending is just ridiculously gratifying. See this, it's entertaining and will change your opinion on vampire movies.

Now that I wrote all this nonsense and feel like an elitist asshole, I will end my post for today. See some movies and have some fun. All movies have something good about them (per Kubrick). Crap. Quoting great filmmakers. That's elitist.

Getting up at 4:30am tomorrow for a shoot at Far Rockaway Beach.

feeling the itch to write

I need to be sure to write as often as possible, I dare say every day. I resist it, not because I don't want to do it or don't like it, but it is hard. But I guess I don't always need to write creatively. I can write in this blog, I am doing a journal for my experience making my current film, and then I could do some creative writing. I just know I need to do it a lot. My directing teacher, who was Spike Lee's classmate at NYU in the 80's, said Spike wasn't the best among his classmates, but he worked the hardest, he talked and listened to people, and he wrote. A lot. Every day.

I need to write every day. It makes me feel good.

i've got some catching up to do

So it's been well over a month since I've last written and absolutely nothing has happened. New York is really boring and is no better than Manassas, Virginia. 

I hope I don't even need to say "just kidding". A lot has been going on, so I'll try to be brief. The first 6-7 weeks of school were kind of like a boot camp. 8 classes with 8-10 class meetings a week. We made a film/project a week, sometimes on film and sometimes on video, for our directing classes. We wrote the screenplay for our MOS project which is a 16mm black and white silent film which had to be shot entirely outside with no dialogue (MOS means "mit out sound" and is German and I have no idea what it really means but it means no sound/dialogue). In all of our classes we did smaller projects/assignments while the overall arch prepared us for our MOS. Last Monday was the last day of classes and now for the next month we make our films. We are all broken up into crews and each direct our screenplay while rotating crew positions on our group member's shoots. We resume classes in early November and start preparing for our documentaries which we will shoot over winter break all while editing our MOS projects for mid-December evaluations with the entire first year faculty. 

I shot my film first last Tuesday and Wednesday. I had some trouble in post-production finding a location and I didn't cast my lead actress (an 8 year girl) until a couple days before, but I have to say I was blessed with a great shoot. The film is at the lab now so as long as it comes back with images on it (I will find out Monday) I can honestly say I had a great shoot. The little girl I cast is the next Jodie Foster and no that is not an overstatement. She did the same takes and the same action over and over all day without ever complaining and she always hit her marks. She was professional and she could recite my whole story from memory, which she did when asked what the film was about in her audition. She was interested in the camera and learned how to focus on things, learned about the matte box and filters and had a great time clapping the slate. She worked long days and never, ever, ever misbehaved. She made my movie for me and I would have never finished if it wasn't for her work ethic. She would question my judgement about angles and ask "Is this going to look good?" and I would always answer "I hope so." She did a wonderful job so I hope everything I was responsible for "looks good."

The film cost me a lot of money so I am hoping to do some temp work before classes start again between classes to pick up some extra cash. I am also hoping the film comes out like I hope it will (I got all positive feedback from my peers and friends who read the screenplay which is very unusual for something I have written) so as long as I am a competent director I should end up with a decent film, which could equal a decent film festival run which I hope equals prizes that will help me pay off my debt and begin working on my next film. In the spring when we return from break we begin editing our docs and begin writing our next project: an adaptation. Before break we will be given about 12 short stories and we choose one to adapt in the spring. I am really, really excited about this project because I have never adapted something before and I am starting to find that I am very interested in fiction based on true events, so it will be good experience for me. I hope we are given some well-known, famous short stories and not just stories from MFA writing students but I guess it doesn't matter as long as there is some good subject matter. I just have a couple short stories in mind that I would like to take a crack at.

I started looking for internships for this summer. I want to get one with Spike Lee's or Michael Moore's production company so I am started early. NYC is expensive. It is getting cold here. I saw two movies in the theater yesterday (movies are $12 here and none I've been to have a student discount). There are two plays I would like to see this week/soon: one that is compiled from thousands of true stories of people's first time having sex and the other is a musical titled "Life After Bush." There are also some plays with some famous people (Katie Holmes, Peter Sarsgaard, one directed by David Schwimmer)on Broadway right now that I would like to see. We almost ran over Michelle Williams and Spike Jonze with the cart full of camera equipment last week right outside my building. She smiled at me (she is so cute). They watched as we struggled and smiled in sympathy because they don't have to carry their own equipment. 

That's about it for now. I will try to update more regularly again now that I have time to myself again.