Coffee Girl Directs!

What a fun day! It had been a long time since I'd been on a film set. I had a great time. I was the coffee girl, who objects to a famous directors treatment of her CEO, during a company promo, and ends up stealing his job. It was a short film, with just a few shots, but we managed to get everything in about 6 hours. That included equipment set up, dialog, and scene shots. Here are a few photos. A film about a film production. Gotta love it.

The guy on the floor with the lap top was the tele-prompter. The massage therapist in me was at odds with his positioning, but the actor in me ate it all up, the cold coffee, the bright lights, the stale cigarettes, and AV guys. I miss that old familiar geeky humor, I am such a geek at heart. I hope to help out the film class all next week as well, doing whatever is needed; acting, set building, etc. The story I heard is that when all the short films are done, they will be tied together, and shown in the back ground of a live performance broadcast over public television at the end of the quarter. Woo hoo! I will post the dates when I know more.

Hirsh, this might be what you get from me for a film.... lots of photos of film sets, and a air date.

prouduction planning, and Progress!

I visited the TV studio today and was present for the planning meeting for tomorrow's shoot. I was recruited to play "coffee girl". That shoot starts at 8 am so I do need my beauty rest. I am very excited.

I spent several hours in the computer lab trying to arrange my photos for one page montage of my different looks for Dave, the instructor at the CAM to keep on file. I hope to get more parts in his students productions that way. The time was long and I forgot how to operate Iphoto. ugh. I had to re-choose the photos twice, and the computer crashed. Yes! -from the 700 photos. ugh. I ended up saving the ones I want to use, but Photoland is to expensive in the summer so I have to come up with an alternate plan.

I then spent a great evening with Mike, and we made some fabulous progress on our songs. We now have more then we can cover in a single evening, but we nailed the Key change in the Aretha song, and I even got the fast second verse in Seen it coming, the Nickel back number we recorded last week. Mike was impressed with my progress on the Eva Cassidy tune and thinks we should record again soon to show Hirsh my improvement. Yay!

All in all a very productive day with almost 9 work hours. That sure makes up for the past week! Ok 8 am on site will come early, so I will post the results over the weekend. Thanks to all my supportive readers!

production is time consuming

After everything I explored in the last post, this was a quieter week with a busy work schedule. Yay. Rent is paid!

I spoke to "Kevin" a professional web site designer, for about 2 hours last week, to learn about his work, but we ended up talking about our current mutual art classes and various mediums of design, so I will have to get more on that later. Still it inspired me to continue exploring "painting" with different mediums.

I then spent about 2 and a half hours watching "Don" use CorelDraw9 to create mock product labels. These were part of the "production" work needed for the Commercial his film class was shooting the next day. He used a Wacom drawing pad and stylus for most of the work. I hoped to learn some technology, or editing tips. But in the end it wasn't very directly useful to me at this time.

Still, I learned to allow plenty of time, since creating the mock labels took him hours before I arrived, and then there was about an hour of trying to work out the problems of sending them via email with high resolution. There were multiple IM's back and forth about progress. The files had to be compressed, and resent several times which was tedious.

In the end there were about five mock labels which were all very humorous, and the commercial shoot went well.

I was given an open invitation to visit the studio during class and help with production work as soon as my schedule opens up. I have no idea if I will end up in front of the camera or behind it, but I will be ready for either tomorrow.

meanwhile, its time to visit the OFS and see if there are anymore films to screen, and then meet up with Mike for another round of music and more recording... woot! that is always an evening well spent.