Documentary, complete! Job, complete!

Finally after 9 months of classes that seemed endless and countless extra hours with production and shooting, the short documentary I have been co-working on is complete. My class partner and I just finished post-production on it the other day, which I think pretty much amounted to me throwing my hands up in the air and him doing the final touches. I'm not saying I'm displeased, but I'm also not entirely thrilled with the end result either. It's not the kind of film I wanted to do and it's especially hard for me to work in tandem creatively with someone without either being exactly on the same page as them, or having some kind of defined roles and definition of who has final authority. The end product in my experience with something like that is that the message ends up getting confused somewhere and the presentation seems very haphazard and unfocused.

I will say that our short film is far better produced than a good handful of the SIFF documentaries I saw this year, which is really saying something. The biggest surprise for me in all of this was really the people in my class. For some crazy reason I assumed people who wanted to go into filmmaking would be really nuts about movies! The majority of my classmates were in fact very poorly versed in anything beyond the standard multiplex fare, and I think maybe one of them had actually even attended SIFF once in their life. It was quite a surprise and I had wondered if maybe this was the result of taking the class through the UW and not through, say, Seattle Film Institute which was my second choice. The other surprise for me was how slowly the class moved, but I think again this is the result of the people attending and the teachers being excessively accommodating. I actually overheard one person in the class say that they were very glad they took the Documentary track rather than the Narrative track because "making a documentary is so much less work." That statement just boggled me. After seeing something like Out of Time at this year's SIFF, it's really tough to imagine the idea of a documentary being "easy."

Anyway, so I'm a little grumpy about some of the things from the class, but I'm also happy to have taken it and gotten the experience. There is something to be said for a class pushing you along and continually making you revisit certain topics. During the past year I have also been reading up as much as I can about the filmmaking process, and will continue to do so until I feel comfortable enough to assemble a crew and begin work.

It might be a little difficult to keep up with reading and blogging and seeing movies in the next few months though, because I'm about to start a new job! I have accepted a position at Wizards of the Coast and will be starting fairly soon. I'm very excited about this and can't wait, but it's going to suck up a lot of time and I want to keep log+capture alive and well, so we'll see how things pan out. As a farewell to my current employer, the University of Washington, I have checked out seven Ozu films from the UW library to be viewed hopefully within the next couple of weeks before the new job starts. This is to coincide with a book I am almost done with called Ozu: His Life and Films by Donald Richie, which I highly recommend.