BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS
Sunday, September 05, 2004
This Hollywood Circus
Lisa, one of the teachers I assisted before, was telling us the other day that she, along with her family, will be moving out of their home temporarily because their house will become the main location for Cameron Crowe's next movie Elizabethtown. Elizabethtown will star Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst and is said to be Crowe going back to 'Say Anything' mode (which is the mode I like him best in... imagine Orlando Bloom in the rain holding up a boom box playing 'In Your Eyes', I'm sure madaming kikiligin haha... pero mas maganda pa rin si Ione Skye kay Kirsten hands down.). The production company will not only pay them loads, but will also remodel their kitchen for them. Ah, the magic of Hollywood.
This made me think of all the productions that keep filming here on campus. I wonder how much money the school makes in a year from this racket? Check this list out. I didn't know Charmed and Buffy filmed here; too bad I'm sure some of you out there would have appreciated autographs from those shoots :).
Almost every weekend something's being shot here. And if you amble around downtown on a slow Sunday you'll see something shooting there too. On one short bus ride around downtown, I counted 4 shoots, big and small. I saw Soderbergh and Clooney shooting a scene from Solaris but I still haven't seen Solaris. Gray was telling me that a few weeks ago, on the way to a restaurant, he saw Kaminski, his cinematography-idol-god, shooting a commercial and he nearly fell to his knees (actually he did, and asked for a picture).
It's poignant, even profound, how this shitty schizophrenic town houses all our film dreams, how non-descript warehouse-looking buildings are the incubators for next summer's blockbuster special effects, how you can be in a bus eavesdrop in on a group of gnarly old women and realize that they're discussing their agents because they're all professional film extras, how you don't want to piss off even the most cocky film student because, well, who's to say who'll hit it big.
Late this summer, Ramiro was doing these mock posters for students of a summer workshop on independent film production. He was telling me how all these people were so convinced about the potential of their hypothetical films to hit it big, to be picked up by major stars. One girl even said that she wants to direct and star her film and have Brad Pitt co-star in it, and that she thinks that's pretty likely, and that she's doing a serious dramatic indie because it's easier to get an Oscar that way. And she turns to Ramiro and asks, 'do you think I can get an Oscar with this film?' She didn't have a film, she had a first draft and a fake poster with a ripped off picture of Brad Pitt from the internet. The scary thing is, you can't even discount anyone, you just never know.
The scarier thing is that I know that feeling, that belief in the possibility of an Oscar, an Emmy, whathaveyou, of working with your idol director, of creating a show/cartoon/film/character/story that can be a worldwide smash. I have those dreams - vague, formless, gestating in the back of my head. They don't consume me but I've met enough people who have succeeded in one form or another in this town to know that these fantasies are possible.
I dropped in on a lecture recently and the teacher was trying to answer a rather pointless gripe by one of the students concerning how hard it is to achieve his big Hollywood dream and the professor said ' just do what you do and the big things will take care of themselves.' He should know, he was the first promoter and producer of a then relatively-unknown band of Canadian circus performers in the '80s... 'Cirque du Soliel' ring a bell?
Friday, September 03, 2004
Illusion of Life
This morning, before anyone else came in, I was running and leaping around the lab like an overgrown kid. Well, okay, maybe I am an overgrown kid, but this was research. I was going to animate a scene for Han's film today: A soldier character who looks like Buzz Lightyear, sprints, leaps into the air, weapons materialize all around him, he lands, rolls and points a gun to the camera. I agreed to do it because I wanted more 3d on my reel, also because I've been having trouble fixing my very depressing 2d film and wanted a change.
After a full day's work the scene is about done, and I'm happy I took the project on. It rekindled my interest in, well, animating. You know, that thing I've been supposedly studying for 3 years.
There's animation as filmmaking and there's animation as craft - where you're not concerned about 'the film' or the story or the edit or the sound, where it's just pure acting, really, pure movement, just moving drawings or puppets or CG models around and making them come alive.
We are trained here as independent filmmakers. Often you are asked what you want to say, what your story is, what you're trying to communicate, how it is possible in animation. As for the pure 'animating' side of it, well, we study that but we are led to believe that our purpose in life is to direct, to conceptualize and to lead, to push the boundaries of the medium, to tell stories and touch lives. Yeah, well, I don't know, maybe.
A constant gripe among my peers is that we don't get to do enough animating because we're tied up in all the other processes of filmmaking. In addition to this, the irony of it is that after getting my degree, I have no desire to impose my worldview on anyone these days. The whole process of being a writer-director-animator-filmmaker is draining; it leaves you doubting yourself a lot, doubting if you have anything to say in the first place, doubting if all the time spent is worth it, doubting your skills because you're juggling too many tasks. Contrast that to running around like a kid for research and moving 3d characters around as if you were playing with action figures. Let someone else worry about the story and what it all means. Seeing things come alive, that's the exhilirating part.
And part of me wonders if being an animator - not a filmmaker who does animation, not a director - is something I can live with. I wonder if I could be content just doing that, if my ego can take it.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
- John Cage
Thursday, September 02, 2004
POETRY IN MOTION
The commute from where I'm living now to school is about 45 minutes, sometimes an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. It's a 2 bus commute if I'm in a walking mood, if I'm not it takes 3 buses. My friends tell me that my commute is such a waste of time. If I had a car and I took the freeway I would cut my travel time down to 15 minutes. Such is the nature of the beast that is LA - a sprawling city made functional by its endless freeways, car-obsessed. It doesn't help that the public transportation system is dilapidated and dysfunctional, especially around downtown and the buses have to take the traffic-clogged start-and-stop local roads. At the start, when I was deciding to move out, I mulled over the possibility of getting a rent-a-car at least for my last month's stay here. These days, I don't even think about it anymore, I've grown to enjoy the bus rides for a great many reasons, but the first thing that comes to mind is the... poetry.
Literally, poetry... there are poems on these buses. There is a campaign (which started in NYC) called Poetry in Motion by the Poetry Society of America. Side by side with print ads for vocational schools and aids testing are posters with short poems on them. This was the first one to catch my eye:
What are days for?
I didn't know Larkin before, now after some thorough googling, I have a trove of his poems and am a certified fan. The next time I am at a bookstore I will buy his book.
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
-- Philip Larkin
What I find unique about experiencing Larkin's 'Days' on the bus is that if I weren't in the middle of a commute after a long day, hanging on to a handrail, half-asleep, reeling from the body odor of the guy next to me, stressed out about things I have to do, the poem would've meant less. If I happened to chance upon it, say, on the internet, I don't think I would have given it a second thought.
The same goes for Snyder:
Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of Zen
In the high seat, before-dawn dark,
Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging on Poorman creek.
Thirty miles of dust.
There is no other life.
--Gary Snyder
See, the people on the buses aren't the Hollywood types LA is known for. They're the underpaid workers, largely immigrants, scrapping by day to day (very few USC students take the bus, most of the time I am the only one going down on my stop)- house painters, gardeners, drivers and fat old mexican women with too many children. As I read Snyder's poem and looked at the people around me on that early morning bus, I couldn't help but wonder if these people who know real work, who work with their hands, who are like the log truck drivers in the poem, really are happier as Snyder seems to say, or if they would exchange places with the Student of Zen at the drop of the hat to take them away from the drudgery of work and their tough lives.
There is something magical about art in public places if you are attuned to it. It gives art context, it drops it into your day to day and makes you wonder how it all fits, it is a very different experience from experiencing art in a library or a museum. I'm an on-and-off lover of poetry, a dilettante when it comes to verse. So I'm very grateful that this campaign has rekindled my interest, introduced me to new poets, and made me recognize the power of art in the public sphere.
I read this just before getting off the bus today.
Watching the moon
at dawn,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely:
no part left out.
- Izumi Shikibu
I got out and there was a huge moon over Jefferson St. As I trudged towards school I wondered if I knew myself at all.
Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. ~William Blissett
