Saalon Muyo

Last night, at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, my short film screened before a sizable audience.  At least, it was sizable my standards. That my standards involve numbers I can count on my fingers should be taken into account.

Cranking out a film in two days leaves little time for the emotional roller-coaster I put myself through on creative projects.  I usually hit a nice, bumpy stretch of doubt and self-loathing early into a project.  I doubt the idea, or I wish I had done something more serious, or funnier, or action packed, or I worry that I’m not up to the task of turning the script into a film.  The reasons barely matter. I just freak.  This time, there was no room for self doubt.  So I plowed through the project on determination alone.

Which meant the early part of this week was when I could become a basket case.  The lead up to the screening was one of those long, clicky rises to the top of the hill, where you have plenty of time to see just how far you’re going to drop and think of how many ways things could go wrong.

The worst part was just prior to the screening, when they showed what felt like 45 minutes of the same commercial. I just needed my film to get up on that screen, hear the reaction and deal with whether it was good or bad.  It was a good thing my film was screened third.  I don’t know if I could have taken sitting through an hour of films with my stomach clenched tight enough to turn my dinner into coal.

As for the film itself, I barely remember watching it.  Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember things during it, but it’s like it all happened at the same exact moment, all crunched together.  When you’ve got “surprise ending” as your genre, you can’t relax until you see how people react to the money shot.

And they did. They really did. It’s the best post-film reaction I’ve ever had.  I don’t know how we’ll ultimately stack up against the other films in the festival, but I can’t help but feel we succeeded.

If you haven’t had the chance to see it, now’s the time. It’s up on vimeo and, even better, you can watch it right here, right now, on this very blog.

co workers from Eric Sipple on Vimeo.

Somehow, I got talked into doing a film in 48 hours.  The conversation went like this:

Jennifer: Have you heard of the 48 Hour Film Project?

Eric: SOLD!

Ok, so there wasn’t much convincing involved. I’ve been looking for an excuse to make a film, and the insane constraints of the 48 Hour Film Project seemed like just the ticket.  No time to second guess, freak out, second guess again (is that third guessing?) and end up with no film at all.  I’d have a time limit and a few restrictions to work through.

For those who know me well, my waning energy for film is obvious.  It’s been difficult for me to put my finger on it, but getting the motivation and energy to go through with filming has become more and more difficult over the years.  At first I attributed it to a temporary desire to write mote prose, but as things went on it’s become clear that I was moving away from film, not toward anything else.

So I went for it.

And it was good.

This was my first project with Dave Lucci as a co-pilot. I don’t think anyone’s been riding me harder than him to get back into film, so when the 48 Hour project came up he seemed the natural choice to drag into deadline hell with me.

That, also, was good.

For those who’ve never heard of it, here’s how the 48 works:  On Friday night you pull a genre. It can be anything from the oh-so-generic “Drama” to the what-the-hell-are-you-kidding-me specificity of  “Western.”  And when I say pull I mean, literally, you pull a genre from a hat.  Then everyone shooting in your city gets the same three elements.  A character, a line of dialogue and a prop, which everyone has to use in their film.  If you pull a genre you hate, you can go for a second drawing of one of the wild card genres.

We showed up fearing only one genre choice: Musical or Western.  That’s on one card, so they’re aware that neither of them are possible to pull off in 48 hours unless you already have a composer or dress up like the Man with No Name in your off time.  Of all the genres, this was the only one we decided we’d drop for a wild card.

We pulled Musical or Western.

At that point we had to wait while the elements were given out, then after everyone was done we would be given our wild card.  The wild card genres were far, far sketchier. Things like silent film and family film and historical drama/period piece.  Half of the wild cards possible were crap, and after failing the 15:1 chance of success, we’d be getting the equivalent of a coin flip.  But first, the elements:

• Character: Alan Beaumont, a Phony
• Line of Dialogue: “That’s never happened before.”
• The Prop: “A present” (that did not have to be wrapped)

All pretty easy to work into any script, so no problems there.  By now half of the teams were leaving, secure in their genre choice while the suckers like me stood around hoping for something they could shoot.  As I waited for a wild card pull, I asked some of the others what they had.

“Drama,” one filmmaker said.

Another said, “Comedy.”

Are you kidding me? I pulled frakking musical or western and these guys are trading in gimmie genres like drama and comedy?  What were you hoping for, exactly?

They lined us up by which screening group were in, pulled out five envelops and got to work. If you were first in any of the lines, you got envelope 1.  That was me. I saw an “s” on the slip of paper and feared for a second that we had pulled silent film.

I was wrong.  We got surprise ending.  Now that I can do.

After everything is pulled, you’re on your own until the turn-in deadline of Sunday at 7:30.  We headed out the door, hoping we’d have an idea by the time we got home so we could get writing immediately.  We brainstormed through a few ideas before I got into my head a couple people at a dinner table and someone saying something that stops everything dead, and Dave took that and came up with the surprise.

And once you get the idea, it becomes like every other writing and filming process you’d go through, only with less resting in between steps.  You outline the idea, then you’re immediately writing dialogue, then you’re immediately sending it out and planning shots in your head.  I’ve been trying to decide if the 48 was more like a sprint or a marathon and I’ve decided it’s the worst of both. 48 hours is long enough to really wear you down, but you have no extra time on any individual step, so everything you do feels like a mini-sprint.

Saturday was shooting day at Dave’s apartment, the most echo prone location I’ve ever filmed in. Concrete walls plus wood floors equals microphone hell.  The boom mic was next to useless.  Luckily, I purchased 2 wireless lapel microphones last year.  I hadn’t used them yet, but now seemed to be the time.  The problem filming with untested sound equipment, though, is that you spend the entire shoot hoping you didn’t just bomb the film by screwing something up or using your equipment wrong.  I recorded the whole thing with the boom just in case; if nothing else, I’d have a film.

Shooting was, hands down, the best experience I’ve had filming in years. It was a giant remind of everything that I’d loved about the process and somehow lost.  The energy was great, I had an amazing cast and crew, and things came together in ways I hadn’t expected.

It was a joy to shoot.  The only downside is you start worrying that if you screwed it up, it’s going to be hard to look everyone from the set in the face and tell them that all their hard work was for naught.  On a crappy set, you come away not caring anymore.  On a good set, you don’t want to disappoint anyone.

So Sunday was editing day, and there is little I can say about that but this: this was one of the easiest times editing I’ve ever had.  The footage was great, I ended up with a bunch of little unscripted moments that fleshed out the feel of the scene and the sound from the lapel mics was better than I had hoped.  It was, at least from a purely film technique point of view, the best film I had ever shot.  Other than that, just imagine one long tea-fueled run through Final Cut Pro, ending in a lot of swearing and freaking out at the inevitable last minute video-output problems.

But, we did it.  The film got turned in and will screen at 7:00 PM at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in East Liberty.  And, for the first time in a long time – maybe ever – I am totally satisfied with one of my films.  It may not be for everyone.  Hell, I can’t promise the audience will like it at all.

Me? I couldn’t be happier.

There’s a thing about scheduling that anyone who’s ever programmed, or written or designed for a job knows that people who haven’t have trouble understanding.  Meetings don’t just keep you from working while you’re at them. They screw you up when you know it’s coming up and they screw you up for an hour or two after they’re done.  Paul Graham talks about this discrepancy between “makers” and “managers.”

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I recently finished up a huge project at work.  We moved basically every system but one in the company to a new system, and we did it in less than six months.  This meant that every single department in the company had a significant piece of their job being moved from a familiar system to some new thing that no one fully understood.  That meant someone had to talk to the departments so that we, the development team, could build out the new system properly.

That someone turned to be the development team itself.

The bulk of our work was done over a three month period, during which we had to find out what department heads wanted, find out if what we had done met what they wanted and then make sure what they wanted didn’t clash with what other department heads wanted.  This meant a lot of meetings. A. Lot. Of. Meetings.

There were weeks where I had meetings every other hour.  Those were the weeks I got nothing done.  There was no way for me to get out of a meeting, sort out what we had just talked through and prepare for the next meeting in the hour I had free.  So that also meant I got no design and no programming done either.  Those four hours of meetings might as well have been eight.  At a certain point, your day is segmented that you never get any momentum.

When I’m getting ready to write or program, I spend some time doing what looks like nothing. I skip between websites, send off a brief, no-thought e-mail or two, drop a few pointless notes on twitter.  Stuff like that.  I know when my wife looks at me flitting between websites, she thinks I’m not working and thinks she can talk to me without interrupting anything.  I can’t blame her, but what I’m doing is part of working.  I’m clearing my head, getting into a place where I can do what I have to do.  Things like phone calls from co-workers and my wife showing me funny things on her computer screw that process up.  And meetings?  They absolutely demolish it.

In the creative world this is less of a problem.  Writers work from home, so at the least they don’t have to worry about management meetings and status calls.  Programmers are forced to deal with a half dozen people who think that an hour meeting really only steals an hour out of their day.  In fact, suggesting otherwise is met by a mixture of puzzlement and outright hostility.

But hey, who wants your people to get stuff done when they can have a meeting about the things that could be working on if they weren’t actually in the meeting?

Starting work on a new novel right now and I’m finding myself stuck in a familiar ditch.  At some point early in everything I write I end up here and, as frustrating as it is, it’s not something I can avoid.

Structure, you are my master.

There are things you do early into a story that are very hard to unwind later.  If you write half of your book with short chapters all from the same character’s point of view before realizing one character’s POV isn’t enough, you can’t unwind that by dropping new chapters in-between the others.  At least, I can’t unwind it like that without stressing myself into tossing the book aside for a couple of weeks.

I do the same thing when I program. I spend a lot of time figuring out how I want to name things, how I want to structure my classes and methods so that it all makes sense in the larger scheme of the project.  This doesn’t put me behind schedule, and in fact it usually pays of at some point, but it can feel like a lot of spinning your wheels while it’s going on.

So while a part of me wants to just start slinging words onto the page, I’m keeping the parking break on.  Because I know that at some point in the future of every project I’ll hit a point when taking the time to make elegant changes is no longer an option.  This is the point in programming when someone dumps some unmentioned critical business process onto your desk and needs it in by go-live.  Your only option is to race madly through everything you’ve already done and patch the hell out of your work.  There’s no time to think about how it should best be structured, not anymore.  It’s fire and motion and crossed fingers.

And when that happens, when I hit some point in the story and realize the ending will only work if I add in some unthought of plot threat, I have to hope that the structure of the story is sturdy enough to support a little extra weight.  When you get into the rhythm of something – a story, an application, whatever – you kind of get an instinct for how it all fits together.  That instinct is all you have to guide you when you need to start patching your work midway through.

At times like this, all you can do is hope that you’ll fit the pieces together quickly.  There’s a price to pay for jumping the gun, and that price is a third of an unfinished novel that you hate too much to think about.  It’s hard enough finishing these things. I don’t need to give myself any more reasons than I already have.

Yeah, yeah, it took me long enough, but I finally got Pretty Girl, my latest short film, up on Vimeo.  By “most recent” I mean “first shown in January” but let’s not get nitpicky, shall we?

Enjoy.

(That was a command and not a request.)

(Oh, and also check out “Tomorrow”, my last short film, if you’d like.)

Pretty Girl from DSP Films on Vimeo.

So NPR’s Planet Money podcast challenged its listeners last week: Write a haiku inspired by the recession.  A challenge like that is not one I can pass up.   Especially since haiku is just about the only kind of verse I can write without making babies cry and grown men rend their robes in despair.

Just over 200 people responded with their entries, and of those, about a dozen were read on the podcast that Friday.  Mine was one of them, read by none other than one of my favorite This American Life contributors: Alex Blumberg. Even more than the thrill of hearing it on the podcast, having Alex read something I wrote was just awesome.

And then today? They picked 5 of the haiku and read them nationally, on NPR’s Morning Edition. Including mine.

If you’re interested, you should stop in to that link and listen. The story’s a 4 minute piece by Chana Jaffe-Walt on poetry publication woes in this crappy economy.  At the end they read the haiku.  I think mine is second, but so you know what you’re listening for, here’s the haiku:

thirty winters gone

mills still empty by the shore

some things won’t return

Yes, so awesome your heart is singing.  Whatever. It’s haiku, cut me some slack. Anyway, it was read by Alex Frakking Blumberg on NPR, so that’s gotta make it a little better, right?

I get into arguments a lot. This is not shock to any of you, I know.

Monday morning, as I sit waiting for the dryer repair man to show up and tell me he’ll just need to come back with a different part the next week, I saw that the good folks at Planet Money had posted a link about President Obama’s plan to expand Pell Grant funding.  Without delay, me and my Recession Club friend JL got into a running firefight over it.  It’s what we do.  It’s fun.

Apparently, Laura Conoway at Planet Money found our debate amusing. So amusing, that she gave us a challenge: write a 500 word essay each defending our sides.  Do that, she said, and they’d post our debate on their blog.

How could I turn something like that down.

Today, the debate went live.  JL’s essay can be found here, and my essay can be found here.  Enjoy, if you dare.

After a weekend in my undisclosed writing bunker, I emerged with about 70% of a novella and 1/3 less of a bottle of scotch than I began with.  Neither was quite my goal (I wanted 0% scotch and 100% novella) but all in all, not too bad.

The novella should be done this weekend.  The scotch?

Well, we’ll see.  It is some very good scotch, and I don’t intend to drive much this weekend.

After much deliberation over the suggestions of my peers, I have settled on the following beverage for my weekend writing retreat.

If I could write on a typewriter without wanting to shoot myself, I’d bring my worst white tank top and a pack of cigarettes and do it like a good Depression era writer did it.  Instead, it’ll be me, a laptop and a Robotech t-shirt.

I’ll see you all on the other side.

Everyone in the Pittsburgh Area!

This weekend, from Wednesday, January 21 to Sunday, January 25, I will have a short film running in my friend’s show The Body Beautiful.  The show will be at 8 P.M every day except Sunday, when it will be a 3 P.M. matinee.

My film’s short, but it came out OK considering I shot it on 3 hours of sleep.  I’d love if you could come out and see it, but don’t kill yourself if you can’t.  I’ll put it online once the show is closed.

In case you’re interested, it’s called “Pretty Girl” and is my second short film in a row centered around a dead body.  What’s wrong with me?