Rehearsal A-Go-Go
Mood:  smelly
Now Playing: Ennio Morricone's "Passeggiata In Paese" from his score for "Malena"

dramatic and gymnastic rehearsal for "Respect" went very well last night. i'm extremely excited about the visuals we'll be pulling off with this film. it will be the most visual project i've ever worked on. most of my scripts rely on the dialouge to tell the story or to reveal the characters. this one is almost entirely non-verbal and has everything to do with what you see. tonight we shoot and tomorrow we shoot, unless we do exceptionally well tonight and get everything done in one night -- which isn't that outlandish of a thought, considering the script is a whopping three pages.

the visuals have presented an interesting challenge to Brian and i, as we are poor film students (or rather, poor film school graduates) and we don't really have any fancy-shmancy equipment. so we're stealing a page out of Robert Rodriguez's book and are using a wheelchair for our dolly shots. for our lower dolly shots, we're using a little something i like to call "the Marty McFly dolly," which really just constitutes of strapping the camera to a skateboard and pulling it. the nicest equipment we have is the Panasonic DVX we're shooting with and the jib we found on e-bay for 10$. when you don't have a studio throwing money at you, you have to get creative, which is half the fun. the other half of the fun, for me, is writing it. and the other half is casting it. and then directing it. and watching it be edited into the film.

i have begun The Poor Man's Diet. i don't usually do diets, especially the fad ones, but this one seems to work. it's been tested throughout the ages, being put to especially good use in Ireland around the turn of the century and there are places in Africa where they are still using it en masse. but basically, the way it works is: no money = no food = no unslightly weight gain. i'll keep you posted on how well it works or doesn't work. i'd hate to be the instigator behind a fad diet that doesn't work out.

and since i know you like them so much, here's some pictures from last night's rehearsal: