Trying Not To Write

Beware. Abrupt subject changes lie ahead.

I'm trying not to write tonight. It's Sabbath. But when my mind's a whirl (as it is now), it's hard for me to do anything but. There can be no rest. There can be no relaxation. There can be no idle hands. Because try as I might to push the fear far from mind, I can't help but fret that an idea that's not written down is an idea that's bound to be forgotten -- and I don't subscribe to my wife's notion that "if I forget it, then it wasn't worth remembering." I am convinced I have lost entire Dickensian novels for lack of a piece of paper.

It's the holidays. Tomorrow is the last holiday of 2011 (and the last day of the entire year, for that matter). It's been a bittersweet holiday season (much like most of 2011, for that matter). My grandmother moved into assisted living last month and we went and visited her in San Antonio the week before Christmas. As surreal as it was to see her so small and frail, I really hope to have what she has. She has lived a long and rich life and has created for herself a large, warm, and caring family. I don't know how she views her life, but I do know that she thanks God for it every night. The Fogg family has had its share of bumps and rattles in its travel down the road of life, but I believe we are richer for the journey and I hope she does too.

2012 can't get here fast enough. I believe in 2012. I believe it's going to be a big year. As I said on Facebook recently, I expect big things from 2012, so expect big things from me.

Loren's and my podcast is going strong. Spinning out of that podcast is a new podcast which Dean Trippe and I are currently planning and trying to iron the logistics out on. Season 1 of The Ruffians went well and I'm trying to figure out what a season 2 might hold . . . You Being You also hasn't gone away, despite there not being a new video in some time. I'm still looking for subjects and if you know someone (or are someone) who you think has something to share, drop me a line! I'm also in production on a children's book, which we will be shopping around (I'm guessing) in early 2012. I'd love to see that in book stores.

I've grown weary of the world's negativity and cynicism. I'm currently outlining a story that I would like to use to combat some of that negativity. Only problem with this story is I need a comic book artist to help me see it into fruition. Expect to see me on the lookout for one of those in the near future.

Sigh. I should probably go to bed. But Michael Giacchino's exquisite score for Up is only half-finished and I haven't the heart to turn it off. I'll see it through to the end and see how I feel then.

The Ruffians: Episode 5

Gratuitous Narcissism

at the mercy of technology

Last Friday we filmed the final scene of episode 5 (not the final scene to be filmed, but the final one the audience will see). I was not in a good place when filming began and I hope I didn't take it out on anybody.

The computer started acting up on Thursday. Thankfully, not the editing computer. But my desktop plays a very vital role in all of this (including, but not limited to storing my 200 GB of music). I had just enough time to transfer the pictures and the scripts off the computer before it completely crashed.

There's few things that will sour my day so instantly as the resolute feeling of powerlessness. There was nothing I could do. The computer was gone. I called Dell, told them the error code I was receiving, and the guy on the other end said, "oh yeah, that's a hard drive that's dying. And it looks like your warranty ran out back in 2010, so we won't be able to replace it for you, but you can buy one from us!"

This was the second hard drive Dell had sent me in the four years that I've been paying off my computer. I'm still paying it off and the thing's already failing. "No thanks, Dell. I'll shop around." It's so wildly frustrating -- actually, there's a word for "wildly frustrating" and it's INFURIATING. I tried to not bring that energy to the set, but I'm sure everyone could feel it.

I sent out a text to all my computer-savvy friends and Loren swung in to the rescue and recommended a good hard drive and hard drive dock, that I might save some of my files. I ordered it that night and come Monday, I was back up and running. In the grand scheme of the things, was it a big deal? No.

But I am powerless without electricity. I am at the mercy of technology. If anything refuses to work, or decides to crap out on me, what can I do? My computer has become an extension of me. Everything I'm doing and everything I'm trying to relies completely on it. As grateful as I am for its existence, I kind of resent it.

The Ruffians: Episode 4

It's finally here! Part 1 of our two-part season finale!

Humble Brag

Is it bragging to notice how much you've grown? I hope it isn't, but if it is, I don't care. Because as I sit here editing together episodes 4 and 5 of The Ruffians, I can't help but feel immense pride. Seeing these scenes come together is absolutely thrilling and I really, really can't wait to share them with everybody.

As happy as I was with episodes 1-3, they really don't compare to 4 and 5. Ten months have passed since we began shooting and editing these. I've experimented, I've learned, I've committed to memory. And in those ten months, there have been other projects. Five episodes of You Being You, the live concert video of Derek Webb and Sandra McCracken, and two McKay commercials. It's quite possible that I've done more and grown more in these past 10 months than I did during all four years of film school. I definitely feel more pride over these past 10 months than most anything I did while in film school.

If I had a single piece of advice to any artist, it would be this: Stay busy.

You will not believe how much inspiration comes to you while you're working on something else. You will not believe how much you accomplish in such little time. For reasons unknown to me, the busier you, the more time multiplies. The more you relax and do nothing, the more time slips by you.

Shooting Schedules Are Fluid

Found out last night that one of our actors wasn't able to get off work for the shoot tomorrow. Since said actor is in every scene we were planning on shooting tomorrow, this puts us in something of a bind.

There are only two scenes, in fact, that remain to be shot that doesn't feature said actor. So we are going to push for shooting those scenes, as well as one scene with the actor early in the morning so they can still get to work.

I'm not complaining, but this -- more than genetics -- is why I'm bald.

UPDATE:

While we had secured the location for the scenes we still need to shoot, we had secured them for a different day. We weren't sure if we would have access to them tomorrow. But we just word "that'd be fine." So tomorrow will be quite productive.

The Restlessness Before the Storm

In the musical Nine there is a song called "My Husband Makes Movies." It has been playing on a loop in my head all week long. Weeks like this make me love my wife all the more. Weeks like these make me appreciate her so much more. Weeks like these make me feel sorry for her.

My husband makes movies.

To make them he lives a kind of dream.

I don't sleep well during production. My brain, which is often a constant playground for thoughts, ideas, scenes, characters, and dialog, absolutely refuses to shut off. I lay in bed, wanting to sleep, but story boarding next weekend's scenes instead.

Some men catch fish, some men tie flies,

Some earn their living baking bread.

My husband, he goes a little crazy

Making movies instead.

The lack of sleep makes me cynical -- which, for the project is okay. The Ruffians is a very cynical and judgmental look at the world around me. It's less okay in my day-to-day life. People annoy me. Society frustrates me. I snap at people. And the lack of sleep makes me a little less guarded and I show me true emotions a little too often, a little too raw. I find myself wanting to lock myself in my car and scream at the top of my lungs, just to see what emotions come out and see what the root of my frustration is.

My husband makes movies.

To make them, he makes himself obsessed.

He goes for weeks on end without a bit of rest,

No other way can he achieve his level best.

I often find myself envious of people who can just go home and do nothing. I wonder what it must be like to get off work, eat dinner, and then relax. Because I don't. I can't. My brain won't let me. I look to the day with equal portions of excitement and fear when my brain relaxes and allows life to happen without trying to make sense of it in a bigger context, or reap interesting nuggets out of it for the current or next script.

Some men read books, some shine their shoes.

Some retire early when they've seen the evening news.

My husband only rarely comes to bed,

My husband makes movies instead.

It's torture, to be sure. But I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Chasing Charlie

the bride of episode 5

Two teaser images from episode 5. They are not colour corrected, so expect them to look ever-so-slightly different in the final episode. ;)

Scheduling Episodes 4 & 5

Scheduling might be my least favorite part of the filming process. It might get better, I suppose, when I have money to throw at actors and crew members as incentive for them to leave their jobs, but since I cannot do that, I have to schedule the shoots around everyone's school and work schedule.

One nice thing about episodes 4 and 5 of The Ruffians is that not only are they a two-part singular story, but they use all the same locations. So instead of trying to shoot this in chronological order (by which I mean focusing entirely on episode 4, completing it, and then moving on to episode 5), I am dividing the schedule up by location. We'll be shooting both episodes simultaneously. It's going to be a bit of a challenge come the edit, but it'll ultimately be worth it -- I think.

A Profound Sense of Accomplishment

I like it when a day ends with a profound sense of accomplishment. I don't have enough of them. I have so many days that, at the end of, feel like not enough was accomplished -- or worse yet, were a complete waste.

Working backwards, tonight we had a costume fitting. Bri will be playing Marlena in the next two episodes of The Ruffians and she will be in a wedding dress for most of her screen time (spoilers!). We found a wedding dress for her (thanks to my wonderful co-worker Heather), but Bri somehow always seems to be a little bit smaller every time we see her. She says she's not shrinking, and we are inclined to not believe her, as size can be a relative thing and if she's not getting smaller every time we see her, we're getting bigger. So Kelly had to resize the dress. Bri came over, tried it on, Kelly pinned it where it needed pinning and not an hour later, we had a perfect dress for Marlena.

An hour before Bri came over, I made dinner. It wasn't a huge deal, just black beans and rice with chicken, but the sense of victory over the kitchen cannot be denied.

Leading up to dinner, I was working on a new script -- well, not a new-new script. But a new-ish script. A new script based on an old outline. I wrote an outline for a story that I'm still quite fond of, but I abandoned it upon the release of Inception. There are some very clear similarities between the two and I shook my fist at Christopher Nolan, a little angry that he beat me to it and a little in awe that we had such similar ideas. But with some time having passed, I'm ready to give the story a shot. It is quite different from Inception -- if in nothing else the tone and overall story -- and by the time it gets made, nobody will be comparing it to Inception (ha, as if anyone would have ever).

Fast-forwarding in time to the point after Bri left, I watched the magnificent German film Downfall. I haven't set so still, so enraptured by a movie since . . . well, Inception. It's a fantastic film that everyone should see.

Which brings me to now. I'm taking a moment out from storyboarding the next episodes of Ruffians to share all this with you. I don't do this to gloat or boast, but to share what a good day for me looks like.

Mean Man & The Ruffians

How long has it been since the last Ruffians? Three months? . . . Nope. Just checked Vimeo. It's been four months. For a project that I said I wanted to shoot one a month, why's it taken me so long to follow up the third episode?

Two words: Mean. Man.

We filmed the short in the summer of 2007 and due to a long and convoluted story, it was never properly finished. That's been nagging at me for the past four years. Knowing that there was a project out there that I had begun, that I had invested time and money into and it was just sitting there, not being finished, it drove me a little crazy. So I decided that I was going to include snippets of Mean Man in episode 4 of The Ruffians. I was going to reveal that Charlie was something of a writer, working on a spec script in-between kills. It was going to be a somewhat lighthearted episode that would have ended in someone's homicide.

But I couldn't make it work. For the past four months, I have wrestled with this thing. I have tried to make it work and . . . it just couldn't. Mean Man kept trying to take over the episode and this episode of The Ruffians was suddenly no longer about Charlie, Alexander, or their hit list, but about this strange story that Charlie was trying to tell. It didn't make any sense, it didn't fit into the story, but I was relentless.

Until I relented. I finally admitted that it was just a bad idea that needed to go away. I slapped together a montage of the short film and posted it on Vimeo. That way, people could see what we worked on. I could get out from under its shadow. I could move on with my life. And, no kidding, within 24 hours of me making that decision, episode 4 of Ruffians opened up and revealed itself to me.

It's still going to be something of a strange episode, but I love it. It makes much more sense. It's internally consistent with the rest of the show. It's a little metaphysical (something I wasn't counting on), it's a little out-of-the-box, but I like it. I'm moving into pre-production now.

So stay tuned. There's at least two more episodes of The Ruffians headed your way.

Editing episode 4

I'm putting it together and keep shaking my head.

What were we thinking?

Something Personal

Not to say that The Ruffians and Remnants didn't come from the heart, but the next project I work on is going to be something personal. I've been aching to tell the kind of story that first appealed to me when I got into film. Something small, intimate, raw and deeply personal.

I've begun my first draft.

Crafting Episode 4

Episode 4 of The Ruffians is going to be very Charlie-centric. The original idea for the show was that we would alternate every other episode as an Alexander-centric episode or as a Charlie-centric episode. But once the story began to evolve and the characters became better defined, I realized that every-other-episode wasn't going to be the case. Which really doesn't disappoint me at all. I like the direction the story has gone and the next two episodes are really going to be quite fun.

Episode 5 is basically already written (a first draft at any rate) and it concludes this story. There may be more Ruffian stories down the line, but after episode 5, we'll be done for now. I always knew how I wanted to end the story, so I wrote it before I wrote episode 3 or 4. And there were things that came in episode 5 that are now informing episode 4.

I haven't written episode 4 yet, but I've been feverishly working on it. I actually already have hours of footage that I'm working through and editing that will play a big part of episode 4. Once I see how all that edits together, I'll sit down and write the episode and then we'll shoot it. Quite looking forward to seeing the finishing product on this one. We're going to see Charlie's home life in these next two -- which should prove very interesting.

Exporting Episode 3

In the other room, the laptop is exporting episode 3 of The Ruffians and I really couldn't be happier. I was worried about the light, but it looks great. I was worried how it would edit together, but it all came together. I was worried about the sound, but it sounds great.

This episode has some of my favorite moments so far:

• Alexander switching from tortured soul to man-in-charge
• The moment Ben softens
• Sadie's unintelligible retort to her boyfriend
• Tenika's final scene

This episode might also have my favorite soundtrack so far. I really had to resist using music from Battlestar Galactica (specifically Richard Gibbs' "Goodbye, Baby" from the miniseries' score). It would have been too recognizable to we nerds and would have been too on-the-nose.

It should be up in the next hour or so. Check here and if it's not up yet, check again later!

Rendering Episode 3

There's an on-going joke in the Fogg house that if one wants to know how long a shoot will take, take my estimate and multiply it by three. I don't like to admit it, mainly because I still think my estimates are achievable, but more times than not, this "joke" is really quite close to the truth.

We filmed most of episode 3 on the Monday and Tuesday before the Wednesday the tornadoes hit. That definitely set us back. Tonight we're going to complete the rest of the "car" scene and figure out our plan for filming the opening sequence. I was hoping to edit today, but I didn't count on the 7 hours of render time Final Cut would need to make my video files viewable. So maybe editing will begin tonight. Or tomorrow.

what's in a name?

I often have a hard time with character names. Names are wildly important to me. Not only does the name have to fit the character I'm creating, it has to be a name that I want to hang out with for the next year of my life. I have unfinished screenplays and manuscripts wasting away on my computer because I just couldn't stand to type J-E-S-S-E again. And sometimes the only thing holding me back from starting a story is knowing the character's name.

I read a book once. I don't remember the name or the author. It was, I can tell you, one of those books where a writer tries to tell you how "you too can become a famous write like me!" In that book he said that names are unimportant. They are so unimportant, that you should be able to assign each character a number. Instead of Frank and Sue, call them 1 and 2. Once you finish your manuscript, do a "find & replace" search and change all the 1's to Franks. His philosophy was that not only can names bog you down, but how can you really know your character until you've gone on a complete journey with them? I understand what that writer was saying, but I just can't do that.

I need to know Charlie before I can write for him. Knowing that this guy grew up being called "Charlie" tells me a lot. Speaking of Charlie, that's the other thing I like to do. I like to pay homages to other characters, friends, and heroes of mine with the names I choose (even if I'm the only one who gets it). Taking the characters from The Ruffians, for example:

• CHARLIE HAMMOND. I named him after two of my favorite Charlies ever: Charlie Brown and Charlie from LOST. Hammond, however, came from Russell Hammond, the character Billy Crudup played in Almost Famous. I have this theory that Russell Hammond is actually Charlie's father, but we'll have to wait to see if that's true.
• ALEXANDER GREENE. Originally his name was going to be Xan (though short for Alexander). I work with a guy named Xan who is supremely cool and I liked the name. But Corey, who plays Alexander, preferred going by Alexander. So we went with that. His surname, Greene, came from one of my favorite people from American history, Nathanael Greene.
• SOFIA TOWNSEND . . . I wish I could speak to this name, but it was the creation of Rachel Komorowski. You'd have to ask her. I imagine it's because she's a fan of short shorts and Stuart Townsend.

I'll stop here because I could go on and on about all the different characters I've named. And honestly, it's just not that interesting (except to me).

Time Capsule

Just created a time capsule. Come back to this blog on December 6th, 2011 to open it.