Saturday Feb 8th

Today I officially moved in to FGP#4. I hauled my bedroll and belongings up the stairs around 2 (after waking George with an all-too-early 11AM phone call. We spent about 2 hours reviewing footage from the previous night - dinner party, tarot cards, Chris came over, Hookah, and power-outage— which I had not attended. The footage had its strong moments. Lots of close-ups in CJ's shooting style.

Then we went for some chai/hot chocolate, gathered up a posse (Aurora&Joe) walked to Fort Green Park — a very possible muddy post apocalyptic venue— and then hoofed it over to a burger place on 5th Avenue. Very tasty. I ate Pulled Wild Boar, which was good, but I would have preffered a straight barbecue sauce to the mustardy business they put on it. Then we met up with Michael and headed back to FGP4.

I tried some exercises with Aurora while George gave Nate back his tripod -- it was essentially me putting down my bedroll and interacting with Michael and Joe -- I don't think that went well. It was my second time on camera in this project and my armpits soon stank with fear sweat. When George got back we tried some exercises to get more comfortable on camera -- superfast Q&A : whatsyourfavoritebeer? whoseyourleastfavotiteJapaneseauthor? that kind of thing. It helped a bit, then Evan and I tried some exercises with Casey's deleted scripts.

Francesca and Steph arrived and Trav and Evan came by with Magic Cards. They, with Michael tried to teach me to play - it is a nerdy nerdy enterprise. But I respect that. Evan was a champ in his day, wreaking magical havoc on tearful men of all ages, earning treasure to defend his magical kingdom.

While we were geeking out, the other kids were doing noise and singing work with a shofar and feedback. It was a rad din.

The high point of the night was Michael taking a turn directing. Trav was on camera and George was on lights. M right away had a very elaborate coreographed idea involving interchanging conversation partners and skeevy flirting. Steph was flirting with Joe, and then Aurora started skeeving on Steph, then I switched in for Joe during a pan, and then Francesca switched in for 'rora, and then Joe got back in the mix. . . it got super skeezy.

This was a success I think. Once again however, it could benefit from some tweaked dialog and a couple more rehearsals. Also, I do wish it was grounded in some kind of fictional reality. Or a dream?

I was really into the mixed light tungsten flourescent hybrid that George constructed and I think we should try it out in a white walled room for a more dramatic effect.

All in all a good day.