a multitude of drops

lockdown. right above this desk is a chalkboard. i've actually used it. and i'm crossing things off. commitments must be made.

Sometimes people call me when I'm working on these projects and I feel guilty because I have so little to say - minutiae runs around the inside of my head like goldfish in a small bowl, small details that must be kept track of. A lot of filmmaking is compromise, or balancing things - this is the core of cinematography, and it seems to apply to everything else. In photography your depth of field is dependent on how much light you have and the lens you're using - change the terms and it applies to how you deal with people and get a disparate group to collaborate. I don't know how interesting that is on a moment to moment basis. I remember coming home from film school loading up on gossip from my then girlfriend's job in Human Resources at the Financial Times. I loved it. It wasn't filmmaking.

I picked up a producer, a great guy named Kyle Detweiler. He's taken to it like a fish to water. We also hired the p.a. I wrote about the other day. She's fantastic, and I was right, much better than me. Just out of college, a Korean girl from Santa Cruz who can riff on any subject without taking a breath and make it hilarious. She's also deathly afraid of straws and seaweed. I sort of wasn't joking yesterday to the two of them as we worked that I'm going to have us go skydiving together when this is finished. I've got a really great crew. Tarin, now a three time veteran, showed up today and that made me feel even better about everything. She's my eyes. I can't speak enough of our collaboration; time and again I've forced her into difficult shoots due to the vagaries of everything we've worked on together, and every time she's been gracious and wonderful and always cheers me up by her presence. I have trust issues - I haven't spent a lot of time with Tarin in a personal capacity but I'd trust her with my life. It seems like a really long time ago I met her in the Coastal Cafe in Seattle with my friend Will Markwell hoping that she'd want to work with us. I'd have to say in my entire life I have met very few people who carry themselves with a certain amount of sincere grace, and she's one of them.

I skipped out yesterday because it was a pretty hard day. At the end of it all I was fairly incapable of communicating with anyone. Hyperattenuated focus isn't so healthy for the brain; although obsessiveness carries me through this work. Yesterday was about difficult compromises with people, which are the true heart of filmmaking. You start out with a film that plays on the back of your eyelids and on the way to realization it changes. I try to be open to that change, though, swim in the entropy. Like when you get in water and panic, the water changes around you. And I think some of the best things I've ever shot have resulted from that configuration of random chance that appears before the camera.

I am so sick of room service. But in the past, I'd often skip meals late at night when I actually had time for them. Shoots are weird; you either lose weight (like I tend to do) or gain it, one extreme or the other. I seem to be gaining it on this one. Even in a matter of days.

So we've got a shooting plan, and a list of locations, and a hundred small things to do in the beauracracy of life so our cameras don't get confiscated and people open their doors to the crew. I don't think I've figured out San Diego yet, which is what I hoped to do, but I think I understand now how to show the San Diego of the people who have made it home, thanks to their contribution. I am very weary and at a loss for words. But I can feel in that center of myself about an inch below my heart that come shooting days I'll be excited and energized. That place where you get butterflies. Tingling.