July 10, 1997 - What About That Film Diary?

I've been planning on writing down my thoughts on the making of FROM OUT OF THE BLUE (formerly BASEBALL HEAVEN) for about a year now. Inevitably I haven't had the time, especially the last 3 months. If you ever want to make a movie, take a year off and get some sleep first! What an experience. But I can't wait to finish this one and do it again. (After a year's sleep, of course.)

So much has happened to this point. The last year has been truly an adventure. I keep finding little notes I've made for myself dated 6 months 12 months ago. Nothing I did back then could have possibly prepared me for what was in store. I've heard first time directors say this before. But you really never understand what they mean unless you go through the process yourself. It seems like during production no one could remember what we did the day before. And when we did figure it out, it seemed like it happened two weeks ago, not yesterday. Were we really in Pacifica? Sunnyvale? Berkeley? Is that the day we filmed the pillow fight? Did anyone return the rental car?

Reality check: All of the California footage to date has been transferred to Betacam SP. A fraction of it has been synced. The remainder is to be synced this week. The New Mexico footage has been synced, but I haven't seen it yet (and it's killing me!) It is scheduled for syncing tomorrow. I still have to give them the DAT original for this, and the sound logs.

Stayed up half the night to double check the sound logs for the first four tapes. Some takes sound great, some not so great. It's all eminently workable, though.

Last week over the long weekend holiday I rented a betacam player to view tapes 1-5. I made a 60 minute rough dub from the Beta to SVHS. Pretty exciting. The final film will flow together smoothly, and it looks like it will run about 90 minutes. Katy lights up the screen. She is positively glowing.

Meanwhile there is still more filming to do. With the rough dub I could pinpoint all of the B roll footage I need as well as the footage with the actors. I can get the principal stuff done in two days it looks like, with careful planning. 7/26-27 looks good. That will give me sufficient time to plan for it. Need more lights for the hotel scenes. Talked to Julie at length regarding scene 48, how I want that to look. We seem to be completely in sync there. Need to talk to Katy and Sam about the dialogue changes for scene 19. They're more in line with the initial screenplay. ("This driving, I knew it wouldn't be so hard. Being an adult isn't so hard."). And I came up with the definitive dream sequence while walking in San Francisco. It's really needed to tie in more on Michael's frame of mind. He doesn't talk much and the audience needs insight into his character. The dream will foreshadow Michael and Mary's conversation about Doppler shift, and Mary's description of the poem, which the curious will note is The Second Coming by Yeats.

Hasta Manana