Happy New Year

Further proof that I have been a nerd/geek all my life and was beyond saving even at a young age...

Exhibit C: STAR WARS



This one should be fairly self-explanatory- it was for a book report I did in 4th grade. Yes, on a Star Wars novel. A JUNIOR Star Wars novel- as in, not even the kind that had decent plots. My favorite part is the C3PO made out of a crayon... but it might also be the R2D2 made out of a candle.

self deprication

Since I've been home, I have been scanning and scanning and scanning our old family pictures. The intent was to create a Patterson Family Flickr site to which the whole family has access and can upload family-related pictures. I figured scanning old pictures would be the best way to get them to see the value of the site, which Taylor and I bought everyone for Christmas. The success of it has been dubious, thus far, but I have high hopes.

Anyway, it's kind of humbling to remind yourself of what a frickin' nerd you were as a kid. Let us examine the many ways in which I was/am a nerd (as though you all needed proof).

Exhibit A: FANNY PACK



Can we please discuss the phase when I wore a fanny pack, like, all the time? It was in 2nd and 3rd grade, and my best friend Amie wore one most of the time too. What exactly did I carry in it? Oh, ok, fine I legitimately did have to carry my inhaler around with me all the time. But other than that, what did I have? If I had money, it was negligible, although I do remember Amie and I filling our fanny packs (which we called "pouches" as though we were kangaroos or something) with change and marching off BY OURSELVES to the corner store in her neighborhood to buy candy. So I guess it was marginally useful. Still though... not even Hulk Hogan can pull off the fanny pack thing.


Exhibit B: INVENTOR



I had high aspirations as a child to be an inventor. The inventor stage was sort of ongoing, much like the novelist stage- in contrast to the detective, gymnast, ice skater, etc. stages. In the picture above, my brother is confused by the "hockey stick" I had "invented" for him for his birthday. Ignoring the fact that it is little more than a stick with a box taped to the end and lots of rubber bands, there is the problem of my skewed perception of what "inventing" really was. Creating a hockey stick by yourself does not mean you invented it. Perhaps I was more of a tinkerer. However, there is some evidence that I was way ahead of my time- I also once invented an Automatic Toothbrusher, and another time spent an entire afternoon trying to make an unhooked phone work hooked up only to batteries. A regular Jules Verne, was I.

There will be more exhibits as I get through more photos, but right now I'm beat and pseudodrunk from spending the evening looking for cute Irish boys in bars with Danielle. All evidence points to Irish boys being very not good for either of us, but we look anyway. What would I do without my fellow masochist?

on Evite etiquette

I have a love/hate relationship with Evite. It is at once the most useful and most annoying social internet tool out there- it doesn't scream to the rest of the world that you are having a party and X is or is not invited, like Facebook does, but it has also developed a certain amount of its own irritating habits.

For example: Evite tells the host of the event who on their invite list has or has not viewed the invitation. Have you ever gotten an Evite, opened it, not responded because quite frankly you weren't sure if you could attend the event, and then later GOTTEN AN EMAIL from the host asking you why you hadn't responded? I have. It's annoying. I've also gotten emails from people "just checking" to make sure the Evite hadn't accidentally gone into my Trash folder, when in fact I hadn't opened them at all because I knew I didn't want to go to anything thrown by this particular person. So what do you DO if you don't want to go to something? If you don't open the Evite it shows that you did not do so, and you risk being berated by the host. If you DO open the Evite and don't respond, you risk getting the "why didn't you respond?" email, which is always going to be an awkward one to answer. And if you open it and respond "No" without having a legitimate excuse, you risk people finding out that you are lying.

Which brings us to another annoying factor of the Evite- comments in responses. The site allows you to write something when you RSVP, and the Evite culture- at least among my friends- has developed so that you are expected to write something witty. I have in the past RSVP'd to a party and gotten yet another kind of annoying follow-up email, the "you didn't write anything funny!" email. No. I didn't write anything funny. I have a hard time continually coming up with brief yet hilarious snippets to grace my RSVP's, and it's irritating that I am expected to do so just so that the host or hostess can feel like such a wonderfully witty group of people will be attending their event. This party will be so much fun! Just look at the witty repartee on the Evite!

Ugh.

Just today I got an Evite from a friend, and his AIM away message AND Gchat away message are both "I can tell if you've opened the Evite!" This strikes me as awfully passive agressive and makes me not want to open his Evite at all, but of course I did so and responded with a- legitimate- excuse as to why I may not be able to go. This is one that I actually would go to, if I can, but I may be on set, and I am also annoyed at the expectation that I will read the Evite.

The whole thing makes me long for the days when you'd get an invitation in the mail with a phone number to call to RSVP, and you could time your phone call so that you were reasonably sure no one would be home and you'd get an answering machine. No one to ask questions, no one to sound sad if you can't go. Just plain, old fashioned responses. Wedding invitations are even better- there's no talking involved at all! Just check a box on the card and send it back!

I realize this whole rant makes me sound awfully anti-social. This is not true. I am a lovely person, just one who dislikes particular expectations.

on a more ridiculous note

I need a happier post up here because every time I think about my friend's sister's baby, I start to cry. So I'll tell you something ridiculous.

My apartment in West Hollywood with Li-Wei had the sort of floor-to-ceiling walls of mirrors that I absolutely hate about LA apartments. No matter where you looked, you could see yourself, and it was awful. But because of this, I never needed a full=length mirror, so I never bothered to get one. Now, though, our apartment has exactly one mirror, the one on the bathroom medicine cabinet, and I need a full-length mirror for my room. I figured I'd take the one that was in my closet in San Francisco, since it doesn't get used by anyone anymore. I meant to bring it back after Thanksgiving, but I forgot... I did, however, open my closet to look at it, forgetting that I had plastered the rim of the mirror with cut-out pictures of cute boys from magazines.

It was perhaps the funniest thing I've ever seen. I'll have to post pictures when I get back for Christmas. My 14-year-old self had put up pictures of all the celebrity boys I loved. The list includes, among others:

Leonardo DiCaprio (DUH- love of my adolescent life)
David Duchovny (OTHER love of my adolescent life)
Ewan McGregor (who is still on my List of Famous People I'd Marry No Questions Asked)
Scott Wolfe (whatever happened to him?)
Noah Wyle (hahahahahahaha)
Matthew Fox
Ethan Embry, formerly Ethan Randall

and, this is the funniest one of all...

Ilya Kulik (yes, the ice skater. Yes, the one who is in Center Stage and yes, the one who is probably gay.)

Also scotch-taped all over the mirror and the closet door are words and pictures that I thought were cool and edgy. It's really quite priceless- I'm almost sad to dismantle it, as it means dismantling a piece of my past, but in the long run I think it's better that the mirror gets used. And of course I'll document it with pictures. Too bad I never documented my wall o' X-Files press clippings with pictures, or my door covered in sexy Leonardo DiCaprio pictures.

Edit 12/10/08: After consulting with Top Advisers Julia and Larkin, I have decided NOT to dismantle the mirror's decorations and instead to leave it up as a testament to my youth, for my future children to laugh at and enjoy. I'll have to go to IKEA and get a mirror or something.

if you can

I know that this holiday is a lot tighter, money-wise, than most- it's true for all of us. Still, I wanted to pass along notice of a very worthy charity, should you be looking for something to donate to this year.

The following is from an email sent by a friend whose sister and brother-in-law recently lost their 5 day old baby due to developmental complications:

"My sister and her husband have dedicated themselves to raising money to help the pediatric unit of the London hospital that took care of Zoe. We are not expecting you to give--we know how tight money is for us right now--I just wanted you to know about it.

Here is the website where you can contribute: http://www.justgiving.com/zoeedwards"

And here is the blog my sister kept: http://www.zoeandus.blogspot.com/"


Less sad things soon, promise.

WHY WON'T MY HAIR GROW??

In the midst of my quest to once again have long hair, and given the fact that my hair is now in this horrible sort of almost-longish mullet stage (reminiscent of when I was little), I have stumbled upon this graphic, and it rang incredibly true:

Umami!

I have to work backwards in time for a couple days here to catch up on the important things I haven't written about, namely the feature I worked on, Thanksgiving, and the movies I saw over Thanksgiving weekend. So to start, let's talk about the feature.

This was the first feature Will has shot, and I ended up gaffing it despite the fact that there are any number of other people he probably would have preferred to have gaff it. That aside, I think it turned out pretty well. It was directed by Philip Crippen, whom I was always afraid of in college. He was a grad student when I was at NU and graduated when I was a junior, I believe. I worked on his thesis project there, The Roaring Twenties, kind of randomely for a day or two as a 2nd AC. He was also the TA for 380 when I was taking 381, so I had labs with him and Adam Marshall, and he always seemed way cooler than me so I barely knew him at all before this shoot. Now, of course, I am a huge Philip Crippen fan, and I'm really glad I got to know him better ad got to work on this movie, because it was one of the best sets I've been on in a long time.

Not production-wise, necessarily- the crafty was scarce, the 1st AD was non-existent, and the crew was really small- but the crew that there was, along with the actors in the film, turned out to become some of the best people I've met on a set. It was my first experience with how working on a short for 5 days and working on a feature for two weeks (or more) can really make a difference in how you get to know people. I have never really become friends with actors on a set before, but these actors were so much fun, and it was such a small group of people working every day that we all became friends. That alone made the shoot a lot of fun. Sure, there were not so fun parts- like the fact that Philip and his girlfriend live in an apartmet complex basically on a stairstep street in Silverlake, which served as our set, and there were 87 steps just to get to their front door. But the good far outweighed the bad.

I've told both Will and Philip this, and a few others, but it was the first set I've worked on since being in LA on which I was virtually positive that the resulting film would be good. Working on student films is strange because they could end up great, or they could end up just so-so, and some of them end up horribly- you just never know. Umami! (a working title, I hope) is a romantic screwball comedy about an uptight hypnotist who moves into an apartment where a moonshiner has been squatting. The crazy landlord, a doting girl, a caffeine addict, and the police all get involved in one way or another, and in the end, of course, the hypnotist and the moonshiner fall in love. Don't worry, I haven't ruined anything- it's the sort of movie where you're rooting for them to fall in love from the beginning. It's the journey that matters. The script is absolutely hilarious, and the actors absolutely threw themselves into it. There were multiple takes that were unusable because one person or another started laughing halfway through- more often than not it was Will, and you could see the camera shaking (the camera work was largely handheld). It was awfully nice to be on a set where people laughed so much and didn't take themselves so goddamn seriously.

This is, technically, the "biggest" thing I've ever gaffed. I didn't gaff much in college outside of Wizzer, because I mostly did camera stuff. My first year at AFI I gaffed Chris Burgon's Cycle 1, which basically involved putting lights exactly where he told me to put them, and Mark Ingham's Cycle 3, which involved lots of hard backlight and not much else. Then I gaffed Richard's MOS for a day, but that's it, really. It was really exciting to be doing something on a larger scale, although we ultimately had less equipment than even a Cycle project. It didn't matter, though- we made it go far. It was a good exercise in fast, efficient but nice lighting. I think Will and I both ended up learning a fair bit about low-profile sets and how to work with them... which is good, because I'm about to shoot a VERY low profile NYFA thesis film, on which I have basically no crew.

I barely had any crew on Umami! either, but I had some... on most days at least one recent Northwestern grad would show up to grip for me. The producer just graduated from Northwestern, so she got a lot of her friends to help out. They basically knew what they were doing, but they really reminded me exactly how much we learned at Northwestern, and the answer is NOT MUCH. They all knew how a C-stand worked, and to put the knuckles on the right, for example, but they didn't know how to set one efficiently or so that it would take up the smallest possible area. I spent a lot of time re-setting C-stands so that the arms weren't poking out into the middle of the room, waiting to gouge someone's eye out, or re-wrangling cable, etc. The great thing about the Northwestern kids (Mark, Aziza, Malcolm and Bruce... Malcolm, Aziza and Bruce all worked on The Rhimers of Eldritch my senior year!) was how enthusiastic they were. I legitimately enjoyed hanging out with them, which was great. There were a lot of Northwestern kids on set in general, and that was really refreshing after being so immersed in the "professional" world of AFI. AFI sets are fun and all, but Northwestern sets always seemed to be a little more... joyous. People looked at it less as a job and more as WE ARE MAKING A MOVIE WOOOOOOOOO!!!! Which is a nice change of pace.

But like I said, the best thing about Umami! was the people I got to work with, and the fact that I got to spend Will's last two weeks in LA working with him. He moved to New York a couple days ago, for who knows how long, and I'm going to miss him like crazy. There are only so many people in the world who went to both Northwestern AND AFI... thank goodness I still have Kevin. Anyway, the crew all loved each other so much that we went out to a karaoke bar the night we wrapped, and tomorrow we're all going bowling. Dorky, but fun, and I'm really looking forward to it. I hope I end up keeping in touch with all these people.

And now, the requisite pictures:


me, Dan (Aki the landlord), Whitney (Win the moonshiner), Levi (Cal the hypnotist), and Will, shooting the Win hypnotism scene... check out the soft box I built to use as an eyelight! It was pretty killer if I do say so myself.


Win being hypnotized by Cal


Justin (the sound guy) and Philip


Levi and Will shooting a scene in the bathroom (and my softbox at work AGAIN... but it doesn't do as well with photo floods so that will take some tinkering)


Levi, Trevor, Dan, Whitney and Molly as Cal, Tommy, Aki, Win and Cookie


Philip being a French Guyanese drug lord


out of moonshine!


maybe my favorite picture... this was the last scene we shot, the "tofrab" scene


main actress, DP and director with Jack Daniels upon wrap