So, uh... Anyone else get sick to your stomach after finishing something and absolutely know you weren't as prepared as you thought you were? Ooo, it's even worse when you get other people involved. It's like that time as a sophomore when I talked a senior girl into being my date to the highschool band equivalent of prom and didn't realize it was a formal event. She looked great in her formal gown but you should've seen me in my khakis, denim button up, and Goofy tie. She sat at another table and got a ride home with other friends that night.
Last Monday I reached out again to Olivia Abassi to see if she'd be up to make something. We've made other stuff in the past and I had a couple loose ideas and some references, but those basically got tossed once we started. She's fantastic on camera and an even better person; Anne and I have basically claimed her as our younger cousin. I think that's why I felt sick to my stomach afterwards knowing she gave up her free time to go make something with me and I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was.
In the end we ended up with two different edited pieces, but actually making the sausage couldn't have been pleasant to watch. In going out I'd wanted to shoot some stock type footage to send to my FilmSupply account. The hope was that any sales would pay for our expenses (pizza, coffee, train ride) plus generate some additional passive income for both of us over time. I honestly didn't feel like anything was landing so we stopped for coffee and assessed what we had. We had one shot I absolutely dug and we went back to what we'd enjoyed doing before (her dancing in public to music no one around could hear). She and I came up with two different songs we're each obsessed with at the moment. Olivia knew all the words to "I'd Rather be Blue" sung by Barbra Streisand and I've been wearing out "Ladders" by Mac Miller.
I'm also still working my way through Principles by Ray Dalio and some of it fits in nicely with [in my opinion was] Monday night's train wreck.
"Bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons."
"An ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something."
"The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly."
Originally we'd planned to do Olivia's song as one long take. We did a few different takes and were happy with a couple of them – her performance and my shooting. But once I got back and started through the edit I realized it just wasn't working. Each take had great parts that I didn't want to ditch just because the original idea was to have one single performance. I ended up syncing up the different takes like a multicam shoot and edited using that idea. I'd already made 2k proxies from the original 8k .R3D files so it wasn't that taxing on my computer run the multiple takes at once. It actually made for an interesting way to approach the edit and an idea I'd be all about using again.
The Mac Miller track ended up being way too long to stay interesting with my original idea. We did a few take with her dancing to the nearly five minute track and I knew right off the bat it wasn't going to work using a single take. Rather than just ditching the footage in post, I synced it up with the track and marked each downbeat throughout each take. From there I made a 60 second edit of the track and pulled some selects from the stock footage we shot at the beginning of the night. The thought was to make a short piece where our hero, Oliva, was trying to get to an event or meet up with someone who in the end would cancel. The dancing part was what she had to do mentally to deal with the stress of someone bailing on her.
The footage from these two films is available for licensing over at Filmsupply.