According to a recent mad manifesto I wrote, this blog is the video blog. Its purposes are roughly:

news on anything directly related to film or video. Projects taken on, inspiring works and moments (may be some LJ overlap there), the evolution of concepts, technical achievements ideas or practices, film work or anything about schooling, news, video posts -- so there's a lot of material I've barely even touched on there, it being relatively new.

The implication here is that I post wholly formed ideas, fully developed concepts, as part of the concept evolution process. Well, I happen to have such a theoretically wholly formed idea that I wrote for a film program application this past winter. CalArts, actually, who have since rejected me. Though if I read it now I'll likely find things to change in it, I don't want to alter the ideas of it at all right now, just to post it here exactly as the admissions people saw it. It's more interesting that way. It filled up almost two pages, single-spaced, 12 point -- it went overboard on length (although, hey! they didn't list any limit...). It follows, though I didn't block-quote it because I thought that'd be annoying. I titled it "the Terkwhalt Economy."

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This is a limited television series of four or five half-hour episodes set among the dessert denizens of a community called Saykle. It is a kind of fantasied-up Masada, sitting on top of a mesa, surrounded by eerie, arid, and beautiful desert. Water is collected via a few balloons called cloudospheres. which hang so high in the sky that they can’t be seen with the naked eye. Their pipes and cables fix to the edges of the plateau; they extend like beanstalks into the blue above. Mines, glittering and colorful, delve deep into the Mesa, producing minerals, called the neam, that are refined into essential fertilizer. Both neam and cloudosphere meet in the middle to grow trees, the essential food supply of Saykle, but which are just called trees. The three-part dynamic which thus arises is referred to as the Terkwhalt Economy, named for the brilliant scientist and utopian Alpack Terkwhal, founder of Saykle and inventor of the cloudosphere.

Our hero is Damson Plum, the fifteen year old son of a treeman retailer. His family buys wholesale minerals from miners and water from scientists, and sells both to treemen for a profit. Damson is self-motivated and efficient, but a little arrogant and self-centered. He can be easily embarrassed as he’ll often find himself affecting a vain façade of homespun merchant wisdom. Class tension between the Sayklish miners and scientists bubbles to the surface as Damson grows into a more relaxed chore load. The two groups’ radically different lifestyles begin to come into conflict over land development. Caught in the middle, the treemen ignore the situation, try to calm it, or else manipulate it for profit. The Plum family business is well-situated to take advantage of this conflict. though its financial heads are too noble to do so. The actions of some Plum competitors, who begin to manipulate the market thus, forces the Plum family to do so in order to stay in business. Damson, who had been fascinated by the business, is disillusioned by the enforced corruption and his life takes a more aimless turn. As a result of this newfound open-endedness, two women find their way into young Plum’s life.

The first is Sita Laba, the young wife of a scientist who is herself proudly descended from Alpack Terkwhal, though she lacks his vision of social harmony. She enters into an affair with Damson when they meet by chance in a fruit market – she assumes that he sells fruit and through a quirky mix-up she smoothly to walk away with him. Slow-speaking, slender, and spacey, whimsically witty, she glides across the floor like the string of a balloon some feet above. The unpredictability of her airy, lightly cynical conversation is like nothing Damson’s seen before; he eventually stops questioning her non-sequitor questions and goes with the flow, just to be around this spectral vision. From a bed they share beneath an open arched window to the starry sky, she regales him with the mention of a society out in the world that loafs about luxuriously all day, while at night, rather than dream, the people do all their day’s labors subconsciously. Poor Damson doesn’t pick up on her manipulation and condescension. To her he is just a plaything for her amusement.

Damson begins seeing Sita regularly, but almost immediately he meets the second girl, young daughter of a mining family. He meets her when sent to pick up a supply of neam. As a foil to Sita Laba, Nonya Estex is a year younger than Damson. She enjoys an outlook of wonder and innocence, complete with childish superstitions and hand-holding. With utmost sincerity she rushes our hero to her “secret place,” a particularly beautiful, but cozy grotto somewhere underground, with the intent of showing him “something really cool that my dad dug up!” Damson is almost ready to buy into this Nonya’s kid romance of play and imagination, especially as he becomes aware of Sita Laba’s subtle condescension and elitism. However, Nonya develops a frightening seriousness about her relationship with Damson, becoming extremely committed to marriage against all odds. Their relationship is also sexless; his relationship with Sita is basically all sex.

Damson is thus compelled to split his time between the two because his aimlessness suddenly is very focused. This practice is very difficult as the fracture between the classes moves into a walls-and-fortifications stage. Nonya is prepared to die a star-crossed death for poor Plum, while Sita is more and more averse to lowering herself to his level, bored and more outwardly stuck-up, which hurts Damson’s feelings. He now feels as though, even if business is corrupt and joyless, and having messed around a bit with nothing to show for it but worry and emotional scarring, he might be able to bring meaning to his life with a real, true love: an equal and companion that he can respect and who respects him back. A weekly duty of Damson’s is the processing of neam into fertilizer that can be sold, which involves a machine worked by two people at a time. Damson’s partner in this task is his cousin Mirabel Greengage, and the two bicker throughout, as they have done with each other for as long as they can remember. Meanwhile, the division of the city slows down; the two ends come to their limits without self-destructive economic cut-off, and the prices of water and minerals are so inflated that every level of society feels the hard times. In these quiet, hungry weeks, it becomes impossible for Damson to enter either the mining or science districts. He has no choice but to preoccupy himself with family market chores. This enforced, mindless task management serves its meditative purposes. It takes his mind off Nonya and Sita, and like an autobiographical grandpa, he slowly lets slip the details of his escapades to Mirabel, who is the only person in his age group that he has around to talk to. She initially accuses Damson of making it all up to sound like a hotshot ladiesman. As he continues his tales, bit by bit, week after week, Mirabel’s icy exterior transparently belies an interest underneath; she is apparently intrigued by Damson’s adventure, or at least has little else to look forward to all week. They continue their work with little choice but little complaint. In time, the miners and scientists come to resent the effects of their division. After a good deal of build-up, the final blow to the barriers comes when a bastard son of Sita Laba, the only living male descendent of Alpack Terkwhalt, very publicly marries a poor neam widow. A constitutional republic with a representative government emerges, and naturally, it is beset with troubling constitutional republic issues of how big the government should be, which industries should be public, how much should taxation be, and so on. But overall, it seems that Saykle has grown up a little.

This concludes the plot description of this story. I feel it is worth pointing out that I imagine Saykle to be in itself a particularly whimsical place, amusing and joyful in just the way it looks. There should be a way out there design of buildings, transportation, flora, interiors, fashion, and so on, based roughly in Steampunk, but on the very quirky end, mixed with a good deal of abstract geometric forms. Where this approach really matters, though, is in the characters themselves. There are many characters barely mentioned here, such as the Plum parents, who all get their own wacky personalities and a good deal of air time, but for whom there is no room to specifically describe here. At every turn, even in Saykle’s darkest hour, there is a lightness owed to the kookiness of the Sayklish themselves: mainly their amusing dress and dialogue. I think overall, characters and visuals, the easiest way to put it roughly is as a cross between the archetypes of Steampunk and Dr. Seuss.

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As for the development of concept, all you really have to know is that Saykle's a desert island I made up to represent myself in the "Pentagon Epic" fiasco, which I honestly can't bear to take the time to explain at the moment. Saykle as I first conceived it was an entire island, the capital of which was three mesa cities called the Drayhams, as opposed to here where it is just one mesa city. The main feature of the island was that it was all but impenetrable except by crossing a desert from the east, where a port shared in ownership by the Albionish and Astorians was set up in case of diplomatic missions, etc. To the south were a set of rocky mountains, the Bergshire, and further south, surrounding the south and west of the island was a shore of sheer cliffs and a set of small, similarly sheer islands called the Indayber. To the north, the shores were placid and sandy, but in between them and the Drayhams were a set of extremely difficult dunes known as Bergley. Between the Drayhams and the western shore was a kind of lush Sonoran desert, while the desert that anyone approaching the Drayhams would have to cross was extremely arid.

The Sayklish people themselves were to be tied by implication to air, the air elemental concept. They were the only people on the map to have harnessed steam power (Neam referred to steam in this version), and so were planned out to be fairly steampunk. They would have had airships and hot air balloons. Their main symbol was the "Terkwal Sworl," a connection of three spirals, kinda Celtic. Their naming is a combination of Englishisms and Yiddish and personal choices. They were to behave in character and have an architecture and culture that combined Native Americans and fairies, Indians and English. They were to be spacey, guarded, cryptic, with a pseudo-spiritual connection to the Neam, hot air, and gunpowder (which each had their own names).

But I was pretty stumped on how exactly they would work economically, and it doesn't make sense for an entire people to have the same character. When I adapted the Sayklish idea to this story, I split them up as described. I had a lot of problems generating conflict between the miners and the intellectuals, and if I could change anything, it'd be how that develops. The style of plot developments here is supposed to be very plausible, almost Zola-like (though I didn't happen to read Germinal until almost right after), but the actual setting and so on are totally fanciful, the characters in some cases larger-than-life.

In a rewritten version, the characters would be described as having whimsical, bizarre, unearthly personality traits, but full characters pushed around by the plot plausibly... or pushing as the case may be. And of course there's the things I didn't have space to mention. I don't think Steampunk and Dr. Seuss is how I'd actually want it done, I think something closer to a combination of nineteenth century English and some tribe of Native Americans, on all three levels. I'd fix up the main character's story, as well, of course, which is pretty rudimentary. I'm also kind of ashamed of even mentioning Steampunk, they probably just assumed I was some lame fantasy nerd the minute they saw that, with no concept of l'arte! the fools!

White Boar and Personal Understandings

Now, a long time ago I said I'd upload my latest video, White Boar. Here it is, at last:



There. It was hard to convert to the proper size. Finally I found an apparent miracle program called "SUPER." What follows is the description I posted with the video on Youtube.

The blurb I wrote for the my UBC film program application:
"'White Boar,' made after Revelevating in 2007 for the same FIPR class, I wrote, directed, and edited it. A boy discovers that his white board can link his door to any other, and has fun with it. Aiming for anarchic whimsy, ambition exceeded organizational ability as well as actor commitment and in the end it lacks key scenes and shots that would not only have made it intelligible, but astounding. The white board idea is original, but any real story around it would have either been too pretentiously sincere, too pointlessly ironic, or just ordinary. To be original through and through, I used characters who can be anyone at any time by the virtue of having no character at all. I found out what would happen if I let them lead the story, rather than 'boy uses white board portal to win back girlfriend.'"

I wrote a bunch of good descriptions of my videos for various film applications... Maybe I should go back to the videos and change their descriptions with them. Don't feel like it now.


It's finals season here, and, as I see it, I've been doing a very creative thing, and a thing very good for me, just by sponging around, sponging facts and ideas. I'm reading again. Books. You probably know this: books that are out of copyright are on the internet, and I can then put these books on my iPod. Sure, they're old books, but there's a lot of old authors I haven't read. Somehow (dubious legally) I found a copy of Lot 49 out there, too, which I've been reading along with the Wind in the Willows and Father Goriot. There's always more old authors than new ones. I'm curious about birdwatching, although this is a crummy time to get curious, since I'm leaving in a month or something, possibly never coming back, and never coming back to all the really cool birds here in Cancouva. My listening to music is, as usual, very exploratory, and I'm probably more serious about it than ever, because I have more reason to be exploratory than ever -- it's not just whim anymore, it's whim plus intense focus. I'm listening to an ever-broader range in ever-greater depth, and it's very provocative, and that's the point. I'm thinking about music more than ever, about... the way people listen to it and the different people who do and the different musics that rub up against each other, and how those factors change together over time, and why, and what connects or separates these different eras, and does music change societies, or societies music? For instance, isn't the homespun, unambitious attitude of 80s/90s indie pop -- these fringe kids who aren't macho or -- connected in spirit, somehow, to the folk musics that ran parallel to high art classicists? What does it mean that the fringe music of today claims to be more artistically valid than the mass cultural stuff? It's not fully formed or arguable ideas by any means, it's... intuitive. And I feel I have to start writing it down, so I can draw on it later, should I need things to draw on. Most of my thinking is centered around placing the dawn of the twenty-first century in perspective and understanding the ideologies and scenes of our time as ideologies and scenes. This is largely because I'm having to read my history book a lot (in preparation for finals). It's nothing of substance, really, not in any argumentative, academic way, but, like I said, it's good fodder... weird characters, I don't know. And it means something to me. And me, oh, how I think about ME. That's certainly something for another post, in fact, and ought to go in a different journal entirely -- I've neglected it. I saw a tv biography on walt whitman (aka, A Giant), and think I ought to return to journals and daily observations and recounts of introspections and things like that... I have a pretty meaningless written record right now, it'd be pretty useless if I ever tried to write a poem. It's all -- the key realization is that it doesn't matter how wrong it is or how conceited or pretentious I am in these ideas -- I have them, therefore, I need to make a record of them. I can't be embarrassed of them or lazy about it -- this is it, this is what the artist and writer does, he stares at his soul making funny faces, the soul doing the same thing, and the work comes out depending on who blinks or laughs or cries or opens a jar of peanut butter first.

Oh there's more, by the way. I'm quite possibly going on a trip at the start of May, for a two or three nights, on this island called Savary. I have a number of fantasies and idle forecasts of what it'll be like. A kind of nonstop beach party, I will be in a cabin with what I imagine as "loads" of other kids, many of them strangers, and some acquaintances with whom I will expand my relationship thanks to this time spent together. I look forward to this trip for that but lately for other reasons. One is my newfound interest in what they call "birding." Man, there's gonna be so many cool birds, and the way I see birdwatching is as a very relaxing wander through forest paths and whatnot... basically just an excuse to drift spontaneously around looking at different things, and you do a lot of thinking, too. and that you're looking for birds just gives it kind of a cool purpose, but the point is exploration and being laid back and... well, I'm not an eastern religion kind of guy, but it's similar to oneness with everything kind of thing, because you notice so many things that you wouldn't otherwise, and it makes you wonder about what trees these are or what kind of ground you're on (makes it very easy to understand the nineteenth century evolution of biology from these bourgeois naturalists with loads of free time to trot around the english countryside). So it's also very provocative and good for thinking. But it's also like pokemon, you know, because you have those birds that you think are particularly pretty, or you identify with, or just feel are so important that you have to seem them. Like, I feel I have to see a raven. But it's real life, and you're really going through these wooded areas and beaches and whatnot, things that are so alien and exotic to me, besides which being genuinely beautiful and fine to appreciate. And doing it with people who take a similar, laid back approach, it would be very rewarding, I think, and it's something no one's doing, like, fuck, we've been sitting around in cafes for almost a hundred and fifty years now. I think being out in this savary environment might provide a fair environment for proselytizing a couple of my co-agers. With these kids there's a hippy-like aesthetic with some of them... the guys in a different way than the girls, and it depends on the person a lot. I guess most guys wouldn't be interested, but what do they know? This unthinkable pass-time actually goes along very well with a certain kind of youth (esp. female, the best ones, too, the ones I respect and think are the cutest). No doubt a small part of the whole group, if I were good at being social, I could really get along with these kids.
Now, Two, I can bring a couple of my small instruments or toy instruments, especially my melodica or recorder. and I know that if I can get a drum to come and I guess a guitar, that there could be some fun stuff there.
Three, though... Now, maybe it's an over-ambitious idea, but I think a bit of documentary would be awesome... The temptation, the first thought, is to leap at full life experience coverage, but to capture these kids in their natural habitat, so to speak, I'd have to kind of separate myself from the proceedings. That's the way I see it. Definitely I should bring my camera, and not talk or laugh while I'm holding it (something I hated in my last documentary), but since I won't be able to (and, really, don't want to) fully document the entire journey -- basically, that lacks integrity, in a way, and would come out crappy -- I think the disjointed clips of varied activities and personalities would have to be fixed up in the editing to something that is representative and revealing of this unique, little-known youth culture (among other things that it is), but by necessity of the way it was shot, unconventional. The trick would be to make the unconventional editing form meaningful in itself, to the end that I'm trying to make it meaningful, and in a way that the images represent, too. I don't know, I'm thinking as I go along here. But definitely the premise of this trip has clear, linear potential for documentary, more obvious reason for documentary than I've ever had before. But I guess I might have to buy a couple more batteries.

So this all really is about videos. I just wanted, through all this, to a) provide a written record for my personal reference or scholarly interest after I'm dead, b) get some ideas on paper that I hadn't yet put into complete sentences yet, and c) show in the here and now some of the ideas that are going to, one day or another, end up in fiction. All of the useless facts, all of the meandering thought processes, all of the idle speculation -- it's about developing personal understandings, personal understandings of a lot of things, because I'm interested in a lot of things. It's about finding personal understandings of things, making them palpable, making myself palatable, and making these understandings available -- some of them might be provocative to people. The trick is talent, the goal is to fill potential. Failing in talent is not nearly so bad as having talent and failing in potential. But these are platitudes. Hope you enjoyed this.


Sincerely, Kevin Salzig.


ps: I had the idea myself. You can do this with any justified paragraph by taking the first word (or couple/few words, as necessary) of every line and stringing them into a sentence, altering punctuation as you see fit. They turned out as taking place in parallel worlds where alternate history has produced such different variations on events and people from history that there exists strange countries, totally different words, and different usages of our words. They're particularly funny next to the original paragraphs, but sucks to be you. I only did a couple because I knew I had to keep studying.

As the new century began to crumble, a series of challenged, fered vista rupted dictability. When the Polish-French discovered the ally-emited subatomic constant, tist Max Planck theorized that radiated energy stream clumps missed Planck's ture of a changeable universe.

Popular, the diseased novelist traced once, as generations used the watching, Franco-Prussian charnel-trid.

Popular, the diseased novelist Émile Zola!
[I thought "diseased novelist" is a really great image I should remember, and I even made a note of it, so I'm transcribing that note]

hey world of love and wonder

I'm updating... the film class I mentioned in my last post is long concluded. The one minute video I talk about can be found here:



I made another video, too, it's about a boy who discovers his door with its whiteboard can be used as a portal to anywhere you write on said whiteboard. I haven't been able to upload it, neither on youtube nor here, because of size. I'll keep trying to get it up and it'll appear here eventually.

I didn't update in this blog because I forgot it. Then I remembered it and felt ashamed. Now I've finally decided to update it because of my new idea.

We have youtube, now, which means that essentially infinite hours of video of virtually every kind is at our disposal for perusal. But with the proper know-how it's possible to download these videos.

And with the proper editing software...


so what we get is something akin to this. The classy penguin video is made from the makers' own home videos and it hadn't occurred to me that the internet could be abused for this. By coincidence I've even photoshopped together images from the internet for my last two facebook profile pictures (which should be somewhere on this post). It took stumbling onto the youtube account of one of my high school friends and seeing the sheer human interest of the no-holds-barred personalities of the "Reseda Earthquake '07" series to be moved by the grandness of the possibilities at my disposal.

So whatever I make will probably not have music but use sound from the videos I'm messing with... since I'm not The Books. And hopefully I'll find some way in which to be original. I only have two concerns: time and space. Time being the time it takes to edit a bunch of different videos into one cohesive thing, and space being the hard disk space, or lack of it, at my disposal. I'd probably have to buy an external HD, which is fine since I need one. Maybe when I get a new graphics card I'll also get a new hard drive and go from there. There's no time on this, no definite plans, it's just an idea I had.

Hey blog about videos, it's been a while.

I can't believe I never wrote here about my video class. it's good stuff.

As a result I'm now working on a one-minute video. I've filmed half of it, maybe even the whole thing. Actors, man, actors are a pain. But the actress says she's astrologically aligned. I'm not very good at talking to girls, though, not good at it, no, not really good at it very much.

Do you wonder what my one-minute video is? I will post the idea sheet I sent to the professor.

Abstract:
In climbing a tree, a student progresses from what looks like overwrought unease to brilliant free-spirited hippie-type. He hops down from the tree a king.
General Specific:
A young man -- college-age and dressed as an ordinary student -- walks in apparently deep, troubled, and deeply troubled thoughts. He nearly breaks his face on a tree. It’s a rude awakening that strikes him dumb, and as he stares, or even gazes at the tree, his face registers with some kind of resolve. As though bumping into the tree had bumped him through some kind of mental barrier, he puts his things down and with an air of compulsion makes for an arboreal scaling. This is all too literally the rising action of the video. As he gains altitude and more branches pass under his feet, his appearance becomes gradually (but by some point obviously) less ordinary/bland. He slowly manifests the stereotype of the contemporary free spirit: a scarf, rectangular-black-rimmed glasses, a knit sweater or well-fitted tweed jacket, tighter pants, scene hair (http://classes.design.ucla.edu/Spring04/161A/projects/Ricky/hairstyles/hairstyle.html), maybe even a cigarette appear one at a time on his person. Approaching his destination of the highest possible branch on the tree, he pulls himself up – the tone is dramatic, by some accounts sensationalistic. Seating himself on the highest branch, he looks out at the beauty of the universe. He then hops down and continues the way he had been going, with a change in attitude.
Notes:
Alternatively, a boy and girl bump into each other in front of the tree, and then climb it together. All would be much the same, but with the romantic theme representing, for one thing, the practical idea that things one loves as a child, like tree climbing, aren’t incompatible with the things one loves as an adult, like a serious relationship. The idea being that a person can be child-like without being childish, that it can even be a good thing to be child-like (which is already an idea in the other version). However, the use of two people complicates the blocking and filming considerably, and so is more ambitious. Perhaps which tree is chosen will be important in deciding this.
Yeah, no tree has been chosen yet. That’s as of today, September 16, 2007. Between now and class, though, I hope to find at least some contenders. It ought to be big and suited towards climbing and stable in-tree filming, and ideally off relatively by itself (for long shots used at the beginning, highest point, and as the climber continues on his way). Professor Gallagher, if you know of any such trees, please direct me their way – or keep an eye out, anyways. But I think this campus has enough trees that there’s bound to be at least one that qualifies.

I am using the second options. I have a tree. I give this to you, anyways, because you don't have a choice now, do you? You don't have a choice, now, yeah, see?

Yes! As in, I actually exclaimed "yes!" when typing that. As in, I continue to yell it every time I read it.

I'm finally registered in my film production class. Ahhhh

which means I'm taking down priority on the Tokyo Police Club video and upping priority on the films for the class.

first thing we have to do is a one-minute enterprise. I have to submit what amounts to a treatment on my idea by email as soon as possible. I guess by the next class. One girl is already scheduling the thing.

No official ideas yet, but do you really think you'll be left out when I finally settle down on something? Oh, but I was thinking it would have to do with climbing trees.

Film Career

I just started looking into transfer applications for going from UBC to some other film school. I was looking at the top brass film programs: USC, NYU, UCLA, CalArts, Art Center College of Design, and then also SVA in New York (where someone particularly interesting from eighth grade is going). I glanced at Chapman. I hope I don't have to go there.

USC, UCLA, and SVA don't require portfolios. I think I could get into SVA. And it'd be a lot of fun. I mean, for one, it's a film school. You get experience directly from the get-go and it's highly technical, as well as artistic. You live and breathe filmmaking for four years. And, it's in goddamn manhatten (which is most of what distinguishes it from Chapman, which is in God damned Orange County). So, it'd be more than fun -- it'd be like the best and longest summer camp ever. But I'm not sure summer camp is viable on a resume.

UCLA explicitly states that it requires grades that I don't have (though I'd like to think of it as not having them yet). And probably USC is the same, although I've done a lot more in terms of what classes I've been taking in order to appeal to their tastes.

Meanwhile, the portfolio requirements for CalArts and Art Center are pretty reasonable, and pretty similar. But I don't meet them -- which is to say, my work is not of high enough quality and there's not enough of it. With Art Center (if I interpret things correctly, but I'm really not sure about this), the application is due all the way in March, which gives me time to build things up (especially if I do get into that production class I so desperately need). So, I could make a couple to a few one-minute shorts between now and then. Unfortunately, CalArts's deadlines fit more into usual university standards, and they'd expect a porrtfolio from my by November 11th or something if I want to be accepted into the fall term of 2008.

Before any of this, I looked at the UBC Film Production website.
So apparently, which is to say basically, I can't even apply there, it seems, evidently, is how it appears, or that's my interpretation at least. If you find a way there where I can apply, please tell me. But that is one barren webpage in as far as I can tell.

Did I mention this is all so terrifyingly huge that I have no idea how I'm going to deal with it all and deal with my grades and make some short films all at the same time? And this isn't anything like the totality of the schools I think I want to apply to, it's just the surface scratched. So I'm feeling, um. It's like... what do they call it? ...Stress? Is that the word? It's not one I use a lot... or at least, it hadn't been. I now expect to consider it a true and powerful force in my life, for the rest of the term and year, if not indefinitely. But I must have control over what happens in my life. I must be on top of things and anticipate things before they even know they're going to happen. Yes. I must be the least like I've ever been in my life.

Hey, so, I'm here, I'm in Vancouver.

I'm studying a lot and eating sometimes and there are classes.

When it comes to film, I have a roommate who's also interested in film. He's two or three or four years older than me, and he has a lot more material that he's done. He seems totally down on the video idea. Or pretty much any idea. So, I just have to finish outlining. But I think it's far enough along that we could actually jump into filming at any time.

But I'm awfully hesitant. It has to do with the fact that I don't know this guy, Chris, very well. Or something, something more debilitating and personally my fault, yet which I can't put my finger on. It's very hard to decide why I hesitate. I think I'd feel a lot more comfortable getting started if I just finished outlining it first.

But when it comes to that, it's hard to keep coming up with ideas. It's hard to set aside the time to work on it, too. But I'm sure that there's always more ideas, because there's always new approaches to things, I think.

Also, I'm trying to get into this film production class. It's the basic video production class that you pretty much have to take to get in the film program. It's full, and I'm on the waitinglist. I went to the first class last week, the professor is a really nice guy, absolutely correct about everything he says about film -- I mean, he's really got a handle on what it should take to make a good short, that's my impression. But my first impression was that he looks very similar to William H. Macy. Except that he's sort of a platinum blonde. As if William H. Macy didn't look strange enough, you know? here he is, although I haven't looked at the site or his bio at all -- maybe after I post this I will.

There's two other kids who came to the first class who're on the waitinglist. But in an email (because I'm such a go-getter that I inquired about another class of Gallagher's I could take but only with his personally making an exception for me), he said, "As you know FIPR 233 is full but should there be any drop outs you will be first on the list." So, I'm first on the list. So all I gotta do... is make sure somebody drops out. I will enjoy this opportunity to exercise some evil. Ehehehehehe...



I will also try to just keep coming to classes until he caves.