Home, Sweet Home

Back in LA with trusty drives in hand. The bad news is that DP and I were booked on the last flight out of O'Hare and the worse news is that flight was delayed for about 2 hours. The flight between LAX and ORD might possibly be a tesseract into a special circle of hell designed to torment weary filmmakers. I was so exhausted, so ready to be in my bed, so missing my kitty that I decided to pass the time reviewing footage on the plane and mucking around with my new copy of Final Cut Pro. How or why I was unable to sleep I will probably never know...

So now I am home. Coffee mug in hand, kitty purring beside me. Need a spine adjustment, I think.

I am ready to reflect on what I learned during filming. Not ready to start the exhausting process of reviewing and logging footage. Not just yet.

Production Photos

If you want to see stills from production, click this.

The Kindness of Strangers

Shooting is going pretty well so far. I hired a great sound recordist who can back up as DP which is serendipitous, since we just found out we are getting the opportunity to shoot the city, lake and waterways from a helicopter (yay, yay, yay!), and my DP is convinced that the laws of physics dicate such a machine should not remain aloft and therefore refuses to get into it (boo, boo, boo!)

But to each his own, right? Of course, the helicopter ride takes the cake for being the flashiest example of the kindness of strangers, but we have been treated like royalty all week (ok, royalty who has to lug their own film equipment themselves), but I feel like a princess nonetheless.

The crew has been given access to shoot from the bows of a Wendella sightseeing boat, in the belly of the Field Museum, a bustling kitchen at the Palmer House Hilton, on a barge moving up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal - through the electric fish barrier, and now, the helicopter. It's truly amazing to me again, how passionate folks are about this issue, and now how generous folks are with their time and resources.

I could make an entire doc exclusively starring each one of my amazing cast members!

Is "casting" a dirty word?

As I'm finalizing the list of folks who I will interview on-camera for the film, the word "cast" keeps coming up. Lots of documentaries refer to their subjects as cast, although its connotations are a bit naughty since they hint at something deliberate rather than something organic. We all know that reality TV shows are cast according to a bit of a formula, the sexpot, the serious one, the loose cannon, etc... Of course for my documentary the Asian carp and the city of Chicago are my subjects so for lack of a better word, the people that I've enlisted to speak on-camera about the carp and the city are cast members.

I have only phone-interviewed these people, and they all seem lovely, helpful, knowledgeable and will hopefully help present this issue from all sides. And please, please let there not be a loose cannon in the bunch!

Now that you are intrigued - for the sake of privacy, the fact that all of the cast might not make it into the final film (for time or story), and a bit of suspense - I am keeping the cast under wraps, for now.

Why LOST, Why?

I just found out that after 7 years of loyal "what's down the hatch?"-ing and "who is kate going to end up with?"-ing, and "what the heck is that island, anyway?"-ing, that the series finale of LOST that everyone in the free world is waiting to see, is airing on the weekend smack in the middle of my principal photography.

How, in any space-time continuum, is that fair?

Serendipity, Part 1

It's 2 weeks till we roll camera, and I just got a google alert with this breaking news. Talk about serendipity, that's the first day we'll be set up in Chicago and ready to shoot.

Contacting Illinois Department of Natural Resources now...

Prep, prep and more prep

OMG, i have plane tickets!! This thing is really happening!! Had a production meeting here in LA this weekend with my DP, the insanely smart Kevin Elliott, and my BF, skilled supporter of all things carp, to talk through packing.

Kevin is bringing his 1K chimera on the plane, I bought 2 1k chimera light bulbs from B&H Photo which are being shipped to my fearless associate producer, Allyson Nelson, in Chicago. Also bought a giant flashlight for unexpected dark moments, or filling in between the 1K and the lights that Split Pillow will loan to me. The camera we are using is also Split Pillow's, a Panasonic HVX200 DVCPro camera. It stores data on P2 cards, but sadly Split Pillow only has 8GB cards available for loan. The camera holds two cards at once for a total of 16GB of space. If we shoot at 720(HD), we can shoot for about 30 minutes. Given that I have interviews set up back to back with little downtime and by our workflow estimates, using the camera as a deck, the cards will download to my Macbook Pro at a rate of 1:1 (30 minutes for 30 minutes of data), I am looking into renting bigger cards.

Still need:

• more P2 card storage space
• an in-field sound recordist
• possibly a p2 card reader (so that we don't have to tie up the camera)
• a rental car and somewhere to sleep
• 2x1TB external hard drives for redundant backup