Film School post

This week I'm deep in General Education requirements, slogging through text books and study guides so I can pass those pesky math and science tests in the classes I've put off until my senior year. It's been a while since I've had this sort of class and I have to admit that I don't really know what I'm doing. More often I'm in film school mode, in which creativity and hard work count more than formulas and equations.
But this weekend I did some film school stuff at least.
Saturday I went to a special session with one of the writers for the new season of Family Guy, put on by my old TV Writing prof. The speaker walked in the room and I thought she was a student up until she introduced herself -- a short, laidback twentysomething Asian girl was not the sort of person I expected to be writing for the I guess "cult classic" show, which is sort of like a more surreal, less cuddly, and much more risky (and, I suppose, risqué) Simpsons.
I was more surprised at how nice and unassuming she was, since I don't think of Family Guy as being either of those thing. But hey, people aren't the same as their jobs, who'd have known! She talked about how she got the job (she mostly knew the right people), and the process of writing the show – after someone write a script, the rest of the writing staff sit around a table for a couple of days and rewrite it, sometimes completely. I was familiar with this process, but wasn’t aware that they also will send people away for a few hours to go to “the gag room” and come back with a bunch of ideas for jokes to use in the script. Writing a TV show sounds kind of fun, at least, as long as you don’t sort of hate TV, like I do.
Later that night I got some real-life filmmaking experience recording sound for my friend Christina’s big senior project. I got signed up for the project after I saw her in the hall one day and she asked me if I was interested. “What’s the movie about?” I asked, because I always want to know. “Waiting,” she said. In fact, the film is called About Waiting, and is a series of three short vignettes of people . . . well, waiting. The one we shot on Saturday was about an old security guard losing his eyesight, and we shot it in a parking lot somewhere in Fountain Valley.
It was a pretty fun shoot. There were cool people to work with, a ton of food for the crew, and for one shot they mounted the camera in the back of an El Camino for a tracking shot. Plus I got to work with a new, super-easy digital recorder. The only real downsides were that it was pretty chilly in the parking lot, and that we were moving at a very leisurely pace – I arrived at 6:30 PM and finally left around 3:30 AM. Everyone else was still working on the movie and I suspected it wouldn’t get done until 5 AM at the earliest. This was after cutting quite a few shots from the film.
When I told Christina I had to leave, she teased me for being a slacker, which I guess was a valid criticism. No one else on the set was leaving (there was another guy there to do sound), and although I had church and a lot of homework to do the next day, it’s not like I was the only one in that boat. I don’t do a lot of movie shoots, even though I enjoy them, and I really admire the people who can slog it out for twelve hours straight for the sake of art, or commerce or whatever. That’s just not my life. A lot of being on set is standing around waiting for everyone else to get ready so you can do your job, especially when you’re running sound, and I can only handle so much of that, especially so early in the morning. I guess from now on instead of saying I’m a slacker, I should just say that I’m a writer.