Hate/Love

Heya folks, quick update- still toiling away at the editing of the movie. Running late hours for the last few weeks, noticing a trend with regards to my disposition at the end of these days. I seem to have a hate/love relationship with That Thing. Always have, suspect I always will, as I do with anything else I create. Is that a common dilemma with director or writer types, or is that just my problem? It's this odd, frustrated sensation when I'm down, and a cheerful, optimistic state of mind when feeling good about whatever I'm working on. And it flips every other day.

A few months back while still shooting but having not shot anything in a while, I was feeling really down. Walking around as I tend to do when I have nothing better to do, I think I thought myself into a boiling point and furiously scribbled out the following;
“Trying to make a movie without money is a death-march of pain and agony one must endure to end up with a mediocre product. Right now I feel angry enough to kick somebody in the face while at the same time I just want to sit in some random corner and cry. I obviously can't do either, one would get me arrested and the other would get funny looks. I want to confide in someone these feelings of frustration but I'm not close enough with anyone that I think wouldn't be bored of listening to my whining. Right now I want to drink my troubles away but am too broke to do so, at best I might get slightly tipsy. What a shitty life I live.”

Man, kinda depressing. At least the bright side to that was I felt a lot better after writing that out. Like vomiting bad vibes out of the system. Sometimes it gets worse, but I suppose everyone has their ups and downs. A few days ago I was hitting a down. Having sorta rotten luck at the moment, shit poor for one. Have no money, for nothing. I got left is a Metrocard with about sixteen bucks worth of fares left. So to stretch that out as far as I can I've been walking to and from work, a good five miles each way. Which means I don't get much sleep since I gotta leave home at least an hour earlier, and I get most of my work done at night, which means leaving at ten and getting home near midnight. The walking ain't bad, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm also starving, most days I get by on toast with ham, cheese and oj for breakfast, and a can of Dr. Pepper for dinner since that's all that left in the work fridge. Not good, but I'm surviving. Heh, still got plenty of fat to spare, hardly even feel hungry. Oh man, one day I'll look back at this and laugh. Maybe.

Sometimes I really hate the movie. I'll working on it and telling myself that this is hot garbage. The best I can say is that it's my first movie, and the next one will be better. I just want to squeeze this turd out of the way and move on. But then sometimes I'm thinking it's great. Like today, finally putting music and some voice over into the mix, and I'm loving it. Today, the chase scene in particular was really awesome, like sit down and just watch it five times in a row awesome. I crawl out of the basement feeling pretty good. I think I can honestly say I'm about two nights away from actually putting it all together and getting a rough cut of the entire thing. Progress is being made, and that's really the joy of editing. Chipping away for weeks at this daunting chunk of raw stone and slowly carving it into something resembling a thing.

It's probably why I've been working so hard the last few days, because the end is actually somewhere in sight even though in reality I'm probably only at the halfway point. The self imposed deadlines keep getting pushed back, but I'm starting to get near an actual hard deadline if I'm to finish this by the end of March. Despite my hatred for this movie, there's still a part of me that wants to throw away money by entering it into a few festivals, and some of those deadlines are not too far off. Half of me still loves That Thing enough to be hopeful of a public screening. And the only way I'll find out which side is right is to finish this stupid thing.