NRKANGEL'S BLOG

nRkangel

Blah, blah, Taco...Part the Second or, "What I did on my Summer Vacation."
Friday, August 27, 2004

Where was I...?

There was something I wanted to remember from the last post...think,think,think...

Ahhh, never mind. I'll just pick a place to start.

The unquestioned highlight of the week, aside from not hearing the echoes of work constantly invading my sleep, was "The Reading".

For those of you who don't know, Rod and I are trying the ridiculously impossible task of actually producing our own, independent movie.

This is not a step we took lightly, nor is it one that we are taking while wearing rose colored glasses. (Yes, we've done small, non-public projects before. No we have no formal training. Everything we've learned, we've learned by studying and trying to think of how to emulate.) We know that, ultimately, it comes down to desire, determination and the willingness to have enough faith in ourselves to dump every last nickle into this project. (That and gathering a group of people who have the same desire and energy and sense of fun that we do.)

To that end, we decided to do our first reading with some of the people who may be involved. As this was the first time we'd had it read aloud, Rod was a ball of tension. Tug a little and he would have snapped like Daffy Duck in a room full of rabbits. Strangely I never saw this. He had to tell me later over coffee and breakfast at one in the morning at Denny's.

As expected, things were both good and bad. Most of the people involved were reading cold. Only one or two had a copy of the script beforehand. We wanted this if only to get a fresh perspective from people who had no idea what was coming. Unfortunately, this meant that some of the best lines (it's a comedy) weren't read as we envisioned while other lines got laughs we hadn't quite expected.

The good news is that everyone gave us a thumbs-up, and had a general up-beat attitude after the reading. We discussed the story from several different directions and got some interesting input. The bad news is that we didn't see wild, out-of-your-seat enthusiasm we had hoped for. (Like the lottery, you don't really expect to win, but you never let go of the "what if...".)

So we're on re-writes now and are looking at schedules and pre-production tasks that will go on for the next couple of months.

It's a breath-taking journey, both a little surreal and a little frightening. Like Rod told me: in my current job, I'm a go-to guy when customers have a problem with the equipment. If I want to take this leap, I have to be willing to learn how to walk and speak and spell again all for a different world.

I try, for the most part, not to think about it. If I dwell on it too long, it looks overwhelming. The funny thing is, in my job, I give training classes to techs and engineers on our equipment. When I start, I always tell them that the machine is only complicated if you try to look at everything at once. But everything can be broken down into one small challenge at a time.

35 days left to a new life...this is going to get reeeealy intersting.

Standing Outside the Fire
-Garth Brooks

COMMENTS



POST YOUR COMMENTS

You must log in to post comments.

YOUR OPTIONS

THIS MONTH'S ENTRIES

ARCHIVES

2005 March

2004 November

2004 October

2004 September

2004 August

2004 July

2004 June

OUR SPONSOR