January 20, 1997

After much hassle and more money than expected, I managed to extract my negative and video dailies from Technicolor this afternoon. Robin and I looked at them after work, and it turns out that they aren't good enough to use. I guess I haven't learned how to orient the viewfinder on my CP16R, because the images aren't quite level. And I got dirt on the film by failing to clean the camera, and I even included something in the image that shouldn't have been there. A real professional job all around. I guess I'll just treat it as an expensive cinematography lesson and redo the shot next week. The good news is the shot can definitely look decent if I manage to get my act together.

Robin gave me a VHS copy of all the takes of the yard sale scene, and I watched them several times tonight, trying to figure out how to help this section of the film, which has bewildered so many and never really satisfied me. I'm starting to gravitate toward my original idea of doing the scene in one shot, though this approach will lengthen a scene that most people find endless already. I need to think about it more.

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