Long time, no see...

Wow.  So much has happened since the last post.  Now, symbolically, I shall drop the mask.

The mask of which I speak is the mask of "professionalism", the one I put on to try and seem impressive.  Someday, perhaps soon, it will go back up.  It's the "corporate" thing to do - to wear a slightly formal identity where you avoid pronouns like "I", and try to sound like you know what you're doing.

But it seems rather ridiculous and pretentious to try that now.  Especially since it's been so long since the last post.  Corporations don't go months without updating, normal people do.  And you know what?  I'm just a normal guy, trying to make a movie.

So for the moment, I'll stop trying to impress you.  I'll just talk in my own voice.

Kanashimi is about 90% shot.  The prior schedule held - principal photography went more or less as planned during the mentioned time frame  More or less.  By which I mean there were the usual disasters, which required the usual kinds of improvised solutions.

Which is why we're 90% done instead of 100%.  Just like the software business.  My day job is software developer for a Major Corporation (one whose name you'd immediately recognize and whose products you literally use every single day).  In that business we have a saying - there's the first 90% of the project, then the other 90%.

Now it's time for the other 90%.

Here's a short list of things we had to overcome:

• We had to replace our original Director of Photography
• We lost several locations
• The locations we replaced them with were fine, but there were some, er, complications
• An actor got sick and had to be replaced the day of filming
• Another actor got the schedule mixed up and didn't show on his big day
• It took longer than we thought to shoot some things (doesn't it always?)
• I did a lousy job the first day or two of keeping everyone happy and fed

And so on.  So now, I shall drop the "professional" voice and just talk to you like the fellow enthusiast you probably are.  Directly, plainly.  Because you deserve to know, without the patina of BS, what this process is like, so you can learn from our mistakes, as well as our triumphs.

Right now, I'm cutting together a rough assembly of what we have shot, so we can figure out what we really need to finish shooting (as opposed to what we think we need to finish shooting).  So stay tuned; it's about to get more interesting.

Special thanks to a spectacular cast and crew, without whom this little project would be literally impossible.  I'll be getting into specifics in the coming weeks, but let's just say we have some terrific talent working on this thing!