Stills And Progress

This is a blog that should have gone up weeks ago - however, a frantic job hunt landed me something I wasn't expecting - a job. And an interesting one at that, a little corner cafe in Pasadena, which at first glance, looks like a flower shop. Which, it turns out, was what it used to be, and in a small room down a hall behind the restaurant, it still is.

My first day, the boss opens the door and says "I see you smoke." Was I working for Svengali? Or did I just reek of my mornings intake? It turns out he'd googled me, and stumbled upon a video interview in which I was smoking. This all made him highly skeptical of what exactly I wanted to do at his restaurant. "Pay the rent" I said, figuring what the heck, sometimes honesty works. And it did. What was supposed to be a three day trial period turned into nine days straight, with the hours gradually ascending from 8, 10, 12, and finally 14.
So this hasn't left me much time to fiddle with the footage, other to start sifting through and cataloging it. Here's what I've accomplished so far:

First, I organized the footage into bins labeled with the date each tape was shot on. Then, I began to lay down clips at random into the timeline, looking for patterns, funny stories, or themes that could be explored. After a bit of hair pulling, I finally settled on a way to organize everything into a structure somewhat resembling a narrative.

The concept is the audience will get to know my father in the same order that I did. So the first block I'll be working out is a section entitled 'Dad As: Dad', which will focus on the years before my parents divorced. I then went in and re-organized the footage into new bins labeled "Dad as:Dad" and "Dad as:Sailor" etc. etc.

Since none of this has been edited yet, I went in and exported a few shots that I found to be particularly striking. As usual, there are also a number of shots I found lacking (soft focus, bad composition, etc.), which I might sick co-producer Mike Edwards on fixing, in the form of some pick up shots to be done in the next few months.

Disappointments aside, I'm pretty excited to dig into all this - hopefully, I'll be posting video clips in the near future!



A quiet moment with Dad in his eccentric, clutter-cozy apartment.

Dad in the midst of telling a story - probably about kicking someone's ass.

A haunting shot of Dad, done to try and represent his occasional dark side.

Looking cool at the beach.

AA buddy Michael ...

...and Duke. Two of my favorite people.

Father and Daughter.