Moved to Las Vegas! Still editing my movie :(
Current mood: aggravated
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Last month editing and living at Monica's Silverlake artist studio was a great experience. I've edited together about 5 minutes of usable footage. Unfortuantely a lot of my time last month was taken up with reshooting and now I have 1600 more feet of neg to process when I can afford it.

One great development is that I now have financial backing! My older half-brother, Tom Mulkins, is thinking about going into film producing and has set up his new company Arktos Productions. Last month he offered to make "Palms" the first project to come out under his banner. I'll still make it by myself and have full creative control but he's paying the bills ;) He's already paid for the film I needed for the March reshoots and also took care of some of the processing of my new workprints that I've edited with. Hopefully he'll be able to afford to pay for the processing of about half of the 1600 feet of neg so i can edit with it soon and then next month he should be able to cover the costs of the other half of the film processing. if all of that film comes out good, and I need to do no more reshoots, then I'll be able to finish ediing the whole movie by May.

I'll be buying a cheap splicing kit, probably a used one over ebay, sometime this week. I also be getting some microphones and other bits of sound recording equipment and hopefully I can get started on creating the sound design soon!

My 5 minute rough cut workprint is definitely sparse and incomplete - only about a third of the images I'll need for the final product. But I think it's a great start. Some shots came out great. But I am sick of waiting to see how the other 1600 feet of film has come out. I really want to edit with it already! Film editing is my greatest love and interest in cinema, even more than camerawork and sound design. I love the power of the cut and what can be done with montage. It really is the most unique and essential quality of cinema in my opinion. I'm very much inspired by the great Soviet montage filmmakers of the 1920s and 30s, like Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisentstein, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. The Kuleshov Effect(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect) is awesome! It has inspired so many filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Lipsett, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Stan Brakhage, Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma, Bruce Connor, Francis Coppola and now myself. I believe it was a great experiment that demonstrated the true power of Pure Cinema. One of my favorite movies is Ron Fricke's "Baraka" and I don't know if Mr. Fricke has been inspired by the Soviet montagists and by the Kuleshov Effect but he definitely utilized the technique brilliantly in "Baraka". 

Another huge inspiration is Slavko Vorkapich, a Serbian montagist who was a colleague of Sergei Eisenstein before he moved to Hollywood. He made a fascinating experimental short entitled "The Life and Death of 9413"(1928) that has some great editing, inventive lighting effects,  and surreal sets and props. It got him jobs doing transitional effects, visual effects, and whole montage sequences for features at studios like MGM and Paramount. He crafted his montage sequences from start to finish: conceiving and designing, shooting and editing them. There's some great montages of his included on the light rhythms dvd of the awesome box set "Unseen Cinema"(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AYEIJA/imdb-button/) and they're amazing and electrifying examples of pure cinema. His mastery of the optical printer and his imagination in the cutting room are just phenomenal. He's a true inspiration. He was also dean of the USC film school at one time and his emphasis on filmic expression and the dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in the cinematic art form influenced tons of filmmakers that came through the school, among them George Lucas.

Currently watching : Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Sub) Release date: 18 March, 2003

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