It’s currently 2:20 am on Labor Day and I am sitting on the floor of a home office in the San Fernando valley while a friend/colleague tries to figure out why Final Cut/Motion isn’t making our credit roll nice and clean and professional. The credit roll is one of those things that seems so easy – it’s the earliest form of animation on a movie - they used to roll a sheet of paper by the camera… I’m tempted to try that now. Picture me, with a sharpie, a paper towel roll, and my iphone, making movie magic in the kitchen. If this doesn’t work by 4 am… it’s happening.
This has been a strange pattern on this movie – the easy things have turned into behemoth and troublesome tasks while the hard things have often slipped right into place, eg.: convincing my producer that she should take this journey with me, getting an amazing cast, shooting without going into labor. I’ll admit that at times I’ve been extraordinarily frustrated by our lack of money and resources on this shoestring budget. It’s not easy to work so hard for so long without a pay-off but mostly I’ve been stoked that we managed to make this movie. Totally stoked and enjoying the entire crazy process – even when our movie was a homeless little hard drive going from computer to computer, even when I spent the first four hours of my first mother’s day working on our sound mix, even when we had to re-color time the movie three times. Thank god Jenn (the producer extraordinaire on the film) is so positive… and such a powerhouse. She moves mountains (or gets someone to do it for her) giggling the whole time, “It wouldn’t be The Lake Effect if it was easy!!”
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| Poster by: Nick Tamburri |
As you may or may not know (I’m still wondering if only my mom – or even my mom - will read this fine blog I’m creating) I was eight months pregnant when we shot The Lake Effect. The entire impetus for shooting this film came because I was pregnant, I was assessing my life, I was scared that I had nothing to show for the ten years I had angled to be a director, nothing to show my daughter when she came… and I got an email from a producer looking for a project. A lot of people thought I was crazy to take on such an immense project while pregnant but I did it for her, for my daughter – to show her what was possible, to prove that hard work pays off, to let her know what she’s made of.
We literally planned our production in reverse from my due date, setting our wrap day just days before the last day I would be allowed to fly. It was down to the wire -- My water broke 12 hours after we wrapped a pick-up shoot in Hollywood...
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| 7-26-09 |
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| 7-29-09 |
That was 13 months ago. Nothing makes time fly like having a baby or shooting a film. Honestly, making a movie and having a baby are a lot alike: It’s a lot of waiting, a lot of pushing, and once you get it out in the world, you just hope that people are nice to it.
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