Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Day one of my busy days off.

Sue and I head out after she tries to wake me for an hour and a half. It’s a hard fought battle, but she eventually wins. When we get back, I transfer the diary entries I wrote while we were out onto my computer.

While she crashes for a nap, I start looking around for the plastic bags I got from Bill, who got them from Steve earlier in the week. I can’t find them. Inside the plastic bags should be a CD from the band, as well as a MiniDV tape of the percussion rehearsal that was recorded on Friday.

I look everywhere for this and finally think that it may have been put into the prop box that Alicia has. I hit her up on messenger and it’s discovered that she does indeed, have the magic ingredients that were in the plastic bag.

Since she took her driving test and passed today, she offers to bring the CD and tape over. Once she says that she’ll also grab a coffee, she’s more than welcome. Congratulations on passing Alicia. I’m proud of you.

She gets here and hands me the tape and the CD that has a note on it. On the note seems to be a track list. I head downstairs to put the contents of the tape on my computer, with the hopes of burning it to a DVD. While I’m doing this, Bill calls me from work and puts me on hold. I don’t know if anyone has had this happen to them before, but it’s awesome. I actually always find this very funny when it happens to me.

So when Bill gets back on the line, I get a call and I put that fucker on hold himself. It’s Brad on the other line and he;s curious as to the events on Friday, which is the rehearsal. We’d like to go in and set up equipment, as well as talk to the sound guy who will be there. Brad also lets me know that there will be a couple of other tracks they jam to, but they weren’t recorded during the string rehearsal on Sunday because they ran out of tape. I say no problem, I’d like to kick around to see the string rehearsal anyway.

He also lets me know that the list I got with the CD is a track list of the CD and not the set list for Sunday. He dropped off the tape at Steve’s pad with a full set list of what they’ll be playing. I let him know that I’ll talk to Bill and see when he wants to go up to the rehearsal on Friday because it’s his truck that will be toting all our gear.

Bill calls back and I fill him in on what I’ve been told. He says he’ll grab the shit out of Steve’s mailbox and drop it off when he gets off work at midnight.

All the while this is happening, I’m having a hard time capturing the tape. Sometimes the audio plays, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes there’s a rainbow colored band on the left side of the frame, and sometimes there’s no picture on the tape Steve gave me. I can’t capture this but I try for about an hour.

I’m convinced that Steve’s camera is incredibly dirty, and the dirt rubbed onto the tape, which is now going into my camera. I don’t like this deal one bit, but I have to at least hear what’s going on with the percussion rehearsal. I get the bright idea to play it through my TV, which doesn’t sound as bad as my computer, and put it on my DVR. Lo and behold it actually worked, but I’m a little bummed as I would’ve liked to put both the string and percussion rehearsal into my computer and see if I could make a full band rehearsal for myself. Yeah, I have the CD but I’m told those tracks are outdated and the music has gone through an evolution.

While I’m putting the tape into my DVR, Alicia bounces and Bill calls me back. He can’t find the tape that Brad left at Steve’s joint. He’s under the impression that it’s just the tape, but when I tell him it’s the set list too, he realizes the importance of the package. He thinks maybe Steve asked the neighbors to pick up his mail while he’s gone, so maybe they grabbed it. He’ll head over there and ask them before he heads into work tomorrow. I’m hoping they do.

It’s about 1am now, and the only thing I really have time left to do is capture the rest of the footage. I put in the tape I thought was next to realize that I’m missing a tape. And I’m missing my production binder. I hit Bill and Alicia up on messenger asking if they have them, or if they’ve seen them. Nada on both counts. I tear up the house looking for them but I can’t find them at all.

Bill then hits me up and says that he found the tape in his truck at around 2am. I head over to his place and grab it, then come back home and finish putting everything into the computer.

Tomorrow I have a lot of work to do. I have to storyboard the two huge fight scenes in Episode 4, and I would really like to get cracking on the concert work as well. I’m still unsure about the lighting setup, and I’m pretty sure we don’t have enough people to crew everything we want to do. I would like to listen to the music and arrange lighting cues, but I’m not sure if I know the music well enough to do that, or if we even have the gear to do it. The lighting setup at the theatre isn’t very good for what I would like to do, so I have to think about how to shoot this concert and make it look fairly exciting.