Earning the Right

Tuesday afternoon: a post-war haze of boredom that I must live through now that school is over. Yesterday, at 9:30 A.M., I effectively put the last bullet in the Spring Semester by completing a finals test for Radio and TV. Sure, I still have two more classes tomorrow – screenwriting and portfolio editing, but by now, the teeth are gone…with my final trailer complete and the first act of Sin of the Opiate printed, the cat has effectively been de-clawed.
So what now? To be honest, I’m not perfectly sure. A couple of things flitter around my brain (a mind that has since lost everything through a drain opened after that test). These flitters include the need to rehearse the cast of Wildlifeless, make sure all of that SAG stuff is squared away, the writing of a pre-production and budget plan for Filmic, and the second and third acts of my aforementioned screenplay.
These are all things that must be done…but I highly doubt that I’m going to get around to doing them before Thursday.

Why?

Because at this point, I’m out of the scope. The hurricane has passed. And I survived. I mean really, literally, survived. I spent classes this semester with honors students who insisted that they were “rock stars” who “kicked major butt” and could fly grades higher then any Japanese Zero to blast off from the face of this earth. And just days before the end, I sat next to these honors students in class as their façade melted and their final projects burned out like defective firecrackers. Kids asked for incompletes. Kids seven years older then me. And I walked away from that firebomb.
Last semester, in making The Subject, I weathered a storm of bad production and unfortunate mishaps. This semester, all that was bad and that happened to me, reversed and sunk its teeth into the students of every class I attended. And I walked away unfazed. I don’t believe in cosmic switches or rubber-band effects, but I do believe in escaping the lion’s den. And that’s that.

Now, boredom creeps through this house, hanging like that sweaty thickness of air that has also descended upon the valley as of late. It’s going to be poignant this year. It’s going to be thick. But at the same time, I kind of welcome this boredom. Sure, there are things I will have to do. A couple of movies have to be made. But I feel that I have earned the right to be bored. A novel concept I struggle with is that I feel the need to constantly be doing something. Progress must be made, in school or in an MOC project or in some aspect of my life. For now, I feel like I have earned the ability to sit around, with nothing to do. A screen is in front of my face, and a keyboard at my hands. School has ended, and now I have the right to be here, blogging about useless nonsense and pet-projects, Jackie Carol running in the background. I have the right to collect meaningless bits of information, conundrums, and post them for what they’re worth.

That being said, here’s to nonsensical stream of consciousness at 1:53 on a Phoenix afternoon. The valley is silent minus Josh and Angie. The house molasses.

Minor notes before this rambling ends:

1. I anxiously await this new album…and let me comment that the art is just fantastic.

2. Shutter-ghosting – a new effect I’ve learned about by reading the cinematography forums, as suggested by Joshua J. Provost. In learning about various cinematography techniques for Filmic, I’ve come across some fascinating stuff. Here’s the general summary of Saving Private Ryan: They shot at 24 fps (normal speed) but with a 45 degree shutter angle, making the motion very crisp and jerky. The prints used a 100 IR level of ENR silver retention processing (Josh, you told me this one). The negative was sometimes flashed; the lenses had their anti-reflection coatings removed for more flaring, and some shots were made with a camera with an out-of-sync shutter so that bright highlights were streaking vertically in the frame. The tungsten-balanced film (EXR 200T) was push-processed and instead of a normal 85 filter, they used a half-correction (81EF) for a cooler look.

3. Scottsdale students should check out a new issue of The Vortex for an essay entitled “Murphy Strikes Back”, consequently about the very same thing that plagued my pathetic student body, as well as a short story entitled “The Great American War Flick”. I’d post both of these items on “Leonard Hughes”, but that would be inappropriate and unfair. Just get the magazine (I think its free for crying out loud), because there are lots of other great stories and works in there as well.

4. I promise Gabe that I will post more about this band before the week is out.

That’s all, until the next wave.