Omniscient robot assistant, play "I Know the End" by Phoebe Bridgers

Final bow.

See my CCR on Drive.

Matcha love. <3

Much ado about something

Okay. All the credits seem correct. I've crossed all the things off of all my lists. Most importantly, I've run out of time to tinker. This is it because it has to be.

Penultimately, thanks for reading.

Here's my film opening.

Access via Google Drive

P.S.: barring a large-scale power grid collapse in which this would be the *least* of anyone's concerns, it's pretty likely that my future self will see this blog. Hope you're well. See you soon, I guess :-)

Scandalous! Unsightly! Distasteful!

Checking in with CCR progress. I think I'm done with the script, but a few of the slides are... difficult to work on in any ol' class where people can see my laptop. I well and truly hate it here!*

*I am extremely grateful to live where I do but would also kinda genuinely be in danger if I advertised "I AM WORKING ON A GAY PROJECT WITH GAY PEOPLE IN IT!" So. There's that.

"POALOF" = "Portrait of a Lady on Fire"

That was not, in fact, "it."

Apparently in the 3-AM-ness of me editing the credits, I somehow came to the conclusion that not having dialogue meant I didn't have to include "written by." I'll fix that posthaste!

I got started on my CCR, though :) Stop me if you've heard this before: I am putting far too much time into details that don't really matter all that much. You can see in these screenshots, I've been editing the colors of each element on my Canva slides to match the theme I semi-arbitrarily selected, and I set up three pages of a sticker book to plan the "look." Whatever helps me sleep at night, I guess.

*EDIT: THIS IS NOT IT* Is... is this it?

 **EDIT: THIS IS NOT MY ACTUAL FILM OPENING**

Uh, hey. Here's my film opening.

In case YouTube is uncooperative, you can also watch it here. Oh jeez. I hope you like it.

Editing Review

Just for fun, I thought I’d put a couple screenshots to use and explain what was actually going on with editing.

1. I had a weirdly difficult time landing on an order for the cups, so I put a frame of each on a Google Slide and played around with order there
2. A lot of clips were lost to my inability to trust that the way I set up the tripod was, in fact, fine and good (translation: I kept visibly looking at the camera, which for obvious reasons was un-ideal)
3. I spent far, far too much time (and had far, far too much fun) messing with the credit text color (each credit is color-matched to some element on screen, whether it’s the drink or some background element or Audrey’s hand)
4. I now understand why all the tech blogs were telling me that Premier Rush is wildly inferior to Pro. To quote an unpostable video I recorded while freaking out about the rainbow spinning wheel of doom, "I feel like the silliest goose this side of the Mississippi."

(Espresso) shot and edited

Okay, I am once again a member of the waking world. Here’s a brief recap of shooting at the cafe, in haiku form:

Between customers

Got mocha on the tripod

I am very stressed.

All went well with getting the storyboarded shots, plus a bit of improvisation based on what I was actually doing at work (e.g., it’s not every shift that I have to refill the espresso bean hopper, but it happened to be empty on Thursday, so I thought, “Aha! Content.”)

A couple moments were re-shot because I was wearing my mask in the first iteration. Don’t get me wrong, it felt deeply weird and a little problematic to be bare-faced in the cafe (I got my first job at sixteen in May of 2020— I have never *not* worn a mask at work), but I also have a LOT of feelings about showing my characters’ full faces. For one, acting: the way Camille smiles as Veda *matters,* and I’d be hard-pressed to ask for expression through eyes alone. Plus, if I’m valuing continuity*, it’s an all-or-nothing deal (why wear a mask by the register but not in the walk-in fridge?). But alsooooooooooooo: prepare for me to wax poetic about this genre.

John Hughes’ “Pretty in Pink” came out in 1986, the year my mom turned 18. Even though the film is now generations old, some moments in it are as true and poignant as any scene in “Booksmart” or “Eighth Grade.” I’d argue the best thing about the coming-of-age genre is its ability to capture something universal and timeless: humans have been feeling exhilarated, exhausted, destabilized, and baffled by the process of “coming of age” for as long as there have been HUMANS (like, “first love” is such an enduring theme in literature because it’s an enduringly profound human experience). I feel like I’d be abandoning that aspect of the genre by costuming my characters in a way that dates the film to a window of 20-odd months. If my mom and I can both see ourselves in Andie from “Pretty in Pink,” I think we should both get to see ourselves in Audrey from “Matcha,” you know?

Fun fact of the day! The drink that said "Audrey" and the drink that said "Veda" were irrespectively consumed by those characters' actors. "Audrey" was written on a caramel Frappuccino, which I gave to Camille, and "Veda" was written on an iced matcha latte, which I myself downed while doing the dishes.