Hello friends,

Another story, another experience, and again, it's all over. The last few days have been extremely busy, tiring, stressful, but also fun :). A brief recap for those who weren't there:

It all started at around 7pm, when Jolisa showed up at my place. The weather was poor, I had one person who almost cancelled but then didn't because of weather, and I also had a couple other people cancel for various reasons, so we ended up with a team of eight. Those people were Rachel, Luke, KathleenL, JonV, Victor, Jolisa, Rosalie, and myself. Jolisa, Luke(who had showed up a bit earlier) and I partied for a couple of hours eating candy and drinking root beer, as well as going to pick up equipment. At ~12am, Rosalie and Vic showed up. We all started doing some unproductive brainstorming until Kathleen and Rachel showed up at 1am. When they showed up, we separated into Creative(Rosalie, Kathleen, Jolisa, Vic, and Jon when he arrived the next morning) and Technical(Rachel and Luke) teams. The Creative team went upstairs to start serious brainstorming, while I did a crash course for the Technical team in lighting, audio, and camera operation. Rachel became the camera operator, and Luke took on the role of lighting technician. The Creative team came up with a couple ideas, which we talked about, and then we took a bit of a break at around 3am.

At about this time, I checked the countdown for security elements(certain objects or dialogue we had to incorporate into our movie), and noticed that instead of starting at 5am, we were actually starting at 7am. So, at this point, the processes ground to a halt, and we all kind of chilled out and took naps. I and a few others came up with a couple new ideas before we died as well. So, I ended up sleeping for about an hour between 5:30 and 6:30, and then we finally received our security elements at 7am. This is when the serious planning began, and we finally settled on the imaginary brother idea.

After writing the script, which we finished at around 11am, we started setting up the first shooting at my house, for the breakfast, dinner, and kitchen scenes. That took more or less until 12am, when we finally started shooting. We finished shooting all those scenes at 4pm. Car scenes and in the church vacuuming took another hour after that, and at around 5pm, we packed all the rest of our stuff from my house, and left for a restaurant in Hamilton at 5:30pm. We arrived there at 6pm, and scraped in a finish at 7pm.

I headed back home, while everyone else went their separate ways, edited the movie until 2:30am, had a bunch of technical issues which forced me to stay up until 4am. By that time I was starting to black out periodically, so I was relieved to finally get to bed, for my 8am wake-up time.

So, this was a lot of fun to do, and even though the finished product to me is only "Meh", it was a great experience. Hopefully my next project(which I'm starting work on ASAP) I'm going to spend some serious time on the story and general pre-production, which is where I feel everything I've done so far has been lacking in. But back on topic, I'd like to do some shout-outs:

Vic, for being my main character again. Thanks for being around, and being an awesome actor, and for being helpful in getting us a restaurant location.

Jolisa, for playing a difficult role and doing it well. Also for putting up with my shenanigans(this goes for everyone, actually).

Rosalie, for being adaptable and taking on the role of costumes and make-up supervisor, and performing tasks above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks for being flexible and not freaking out :). Also thanks for sweet romantic comedy ideas :P.

Kathleen, for playing a realistic mother, being cool with wearing bathrobes and classic sweaters, helping out with make-up, and for putting up with my shenanigans.

Jon, for putting a tie and being a dad, helping with anything I'd ask, entertaining the cast and crew, and being cool with being fired a few times.

Rachel, for being a brilliant camera operator, learning new tasks quickly, guarding the equipment with a ferocity unmatched, and for being smart and safe in how you did your job.

Luke, for unexpectedly being an amazing lighting technician. I plan on having you as my lighting guy from now on. Thanks for being excited about your job.

Well, that's all I have to say about that. If you want to contribute to my next project, I'm looking for story ideas(and money) at the moment. Send them in!