Thank Yous and Updates

   Thank you all for your concern over me going hungry. The gift of the pineapple and water and muffins (more, please!) (and thank you kindly.) As well as clearing up doctrinal issues over the proper way to fast. All so good.

   That being said, I suppose I should use this post to update on how things are going with my renewed sense of productivity. Let's see what I said I was working on... writing, rocking, filming, working. Revisiting that post, where I outlined what I was picking up the slack in, was slightly more emotional than I was expecting for the obvious reasons, but that seems to be it. In just the few days since that post, I haven't really had the chance to do anything worth bringing up here. I have been working, but... spoilers, I guess. I can, however, tell you some ideas I've had on what I've been working on.

   Nothing really specific, other than a ton of ideas on how to improve the opening sequence of On Our Own. You see, originally the film was going to open up with a social studies teacher explaining the economy to his students, and what could potentially happen when it fails, foreshadowing the fact that it actually does fail about two scenes later. Unfortunately, shooting with so many students proved to be a hassle continuity-wise, so when we could only get about half of the scene shot, I guess we had no other choice but to cut it entirely because it'd be not at all worth it to get all of the extras back together again in the same positions with the same clothing.

   At press time, we've got it planned so that it opens up on a scene we did manage to shoot in its entirety, which is the kids walking home from school after that class. Because the dialogue here references the scrapped classroom scene, we had to cut that (dialogue) as well. (I'm saying "we" here, but it's really all the director's decisions. I'm just using it as a rhetorical tool to make it seem more immediate, I guess. Maybe to make my own position seem larger than it is, but hey, I'm still a consultant. I would have done these things with him had I been around.) I feel that this really leaves the rest of the film... un-foreshadowed.

   So my idea is to use stock footage of the economy falling, Wall Street protesters, riots breaking out, et cetera in montage (there it is again!) with the normal opening stuff. From how it looks in my head, this will really set up an epic feel for the rest of the movie. I'll bring it up when I get the chance, and we'll see if it's in the budget.

   The stock footage clips I'm eyeing cost anywhere from under fifty to over two thousand dollars to use, but, eh, once you acquire the rights to use them, you acquire the rights to use them. Still, I think some of the news clips might be out of our price range. At least they're long ones, so we get more for our money, but, still, not much money. Any donations toward the budget would be helpful, but I'm not really getting my hopes up. Not even for another muffin.