The last of the exterior shots!

I'm stuck where treasures of childhood litter
the sounds of almost innocense linger
like a stuttering wail &
yesterday's morning was broken with a fist
These marks will also fade
(but I'll never be that smooth blank whole
again.)


About 16-hour day today, shooting outside, on the plus side we didn't have -18 degrees like we had the other day when we shot under St. Eriksbron (bridge) but on the downside it was really wet and damp, so it still got cold and it got in your bones, and my shoes and socks got soaked early in the day so I've been walking around with cold, wet feet all day and night. (You get used to it after a while.) Oh, and I had to get up at three in the morning to catch the night bus to get me into town and to school to co-ordinate extras at half past five, but the bloody bus just drove on right past me, so I was about ten minutes late anyway, so I could just have slept another half hour. But it was fine. I got some coffee from makeup and things went relatively smoothly, as did the rest of the day. Now I'm knackered, but that's a good thing since I'm heading to bed! Up (not quite as) early again tomorrow, which will be a holiday compared to our previous days since we'll be shooting in a studio at school, which means no having to find a location, no co-ordinating extras from and to bus stops and waiting areas and bathrooms and set, no scurrying around in ice-cold puddles all day, no fog or drizzle or snow storms or cold or rain, not getting lost, no confusion about who drives what car where... it'll be heaven! I just have to wake up, get to school, and then I just have to stay there all day long. And there's a 7-eleven just across the street. With proper, good, wonderful 7-eleven coffee. No more awful, toxic, (and in the case of outside shoots, iced) coffee you usually get on set. Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration (not about the ice, you left your cup for more than five minutes, you could turn it upside down and the coffee would stay in the cup) coffee is still coffee, it could never be awful (unless you put anything in it)

But yes, anyway, sleep! and tomorrow: massive zombie shoot out extravaganza with real stunt men and fake weapons and cool special effects! woo hoo!

By the end of this shoot, the film crew won't need makeup to jump in as zombie extras...

Another crazy day on the zombie film shoot, and it's (definitely) not over yet. I actually left the team, cast and crew (we we've been shooting in three different ext. locations today, and when I left they were filming in the very central part of Stockholm, as central as you can probably be, on a roped off stretch of street just above Sergels Torg) to go into school and phone all the extras with call-times and meeting place for monday the 1st, something that my assistant was supposed to do but couldn't and he's also unable to help me out tomorrow, so instead of doing just my job tomorrow, I have to delegate and do both of ours, but I don't think it'll be a problem (and by that, I mean it's not literally impossible)

It's just that I have to, yet again, get up at four o'clock to catch the night bus to the tube and head into town to be at the school before half past five, which is when our first group of zombie extras will be arriving, and basically my task is to co-ordinate them between makeup and costume and then to the car that will take them to set, and then the next group will arrive at seven and after I've greeted them and shown them where the makeup artists are, I'll have to run to catch the tube which will take me to the meeting place for all the other extras that are coming tomorrow but who aren't zombies, and I have to gather them around me and herd them into whichever car the team can spare at that time and make sure they get driven to set...

I can just picture those of you who know me, or knew me, I should say, before this production, how I was then with structure, schedules and organizing things... I'm learning so much on this internship! I call people up on the phone left right and center, I keep track of names and dates and times and tasks, even without my notes, I keep notes, I even have a huge binder with all my papers in one place... no little crumbled up post-it notes, no scribbles on the back of my hand... I know!  

Okay, back to work! The only reason I had time to update this blog is that I was still waiting for the address of the location for monday and the call-times (we do everything, literally, at the last minute in this production... it's just how we roll!)

Det är ni som e de konstiga, det är jag som e normal

The most amazing thing happened the other night. I was working late on the zombie film and Anja phoned me, she was at the train station about to go home to Värmland for the weekend, and was just about to buy her ticket when her brother had phoned and said he had two extra tickets for Thåström! So obviously, since she loves Thåström just as I do, she decided to delay her departure until the next morning and phoned me! So more impromptu than ever I went to a Thåström concert with Anja, her older brother (also the dad of my darling child actor in my short film - that I've finally come up with a title for, by the way... "Vi stannar här" - We're staying here.) and his, slightly toasted friends. It was awesome and magical and fantastic. I love Thåström. When everyone else listened to Backstreet boys and Spice girls, back in the day, I listen to Ebba Grön and Imperiet (which is funny, because apparantly Anja's brother had said the exact same thing to her, except instead of Backstreet boys and Spice girls it was Per Gessle. The previous generation. And Thåström's still standing!)

I'm in the production room of the zombie film right now. People are going mad with stress. We start shooting on Saturday and nothing is done! It's still fun though.

Vitamin water, the new cigarettes?

Hello everyone, once again, it's been a while, I apologise. That's the thing with blogging though, when you have things to write about you don't have the time to, and when you have time to update your blog you really have nothing interesting to say so you ramble on about your cat, the weather, cornflakes and quote music lyrics that really speak to you for some unearthly reason to pass yourself off as deep. But anyway.

I got a crash course in Avid from editor on the Argentina film, and then I started my second intership, which it'll only last a few days total by the looks of it, I've been doing it for two days, and then when the remaining material arrives it'll probably be one more. What I do is that I get the footage up on the screen and find the frame where the clapper comes together, then I go to the sound file for that take and listen for the sound of the clap and time them together so that the footage and sound are in sync with each other. When you've done that with all the material, you cut it up into clips, starting after "Action" and ending before "Cut" and categorize them. This so that it will be easier for the editor to start editing the film. Basically the dirty work of the editing process, although the editor has been working simultaneously with me, so he didn't take me in so that he wouldn't have to do it himself, but so it would go faster and he could start editing sooner. He's also editing the zombie film, and I overheard him talking to a class mate about a script he's written, so he's pretty busy by the sounds of it.

As am I, because beside these two internships, we've also started an evening course in sound editing now and we're starting to plan our next projects, whilst finishing up our previous ones. So plenty of irons in the fire! (and I love it!)

My next project is a short film, a drama, I've already written the script and I also want to direct it, and this time, act in it as well. It's called "Vargens timma" (The wolf's hour. Not to be mistaken for Hour of the wolf, which was my initial idea for the title, until I realized it was already taken by Ingmar Bergman in 1967...), after that I want to do a novella film (which is in-between short and feature length, and is half an hour, which I think is pretty Swedish, or at least I never heard of it in Vancouver... but bascially it's like in literature you have short story, novella and novel... only in Sweden there's no term for novella, which is pretty ironic, but anyway, I'm getting off the topic...) which I've also written the script for, "Brev till min mamma" (Letter to my mother) and after that I have two feature length ideas and one idea that can be either a novella or a feature, I haven't decided yet, but it's inspired by the (not so good) movie "Two girls and a guy" with Robert Downey, Jr. but in my film all three actually get together like a triple (as opposed to couple) and don't just talk about it for two hours, and I think it'll end with one of the girls getting pregnant and the trio deciding to raise the child together and continue living like a family. What do you think? That's my romantic comedy, by the way. The other two features are much more gruesome and extreme. Lots of sex and violence. And sexually confused and deviated characters. And bad language. And good music. And smoking, lots of smoking, because even though I'm starting to dislike it more and more myself in reality, whenever I write something, my characters turn out to be smokers, because I still have some semi-subconscious notion that smoking is cool. Well, it does look cool on film, especially with the right lighting. Like the opening sequence in "A guide to recognizing your saints" with Robert Downey, Jr. It's just him, sitting on a dark stage, holding a lit cigarette, and steeling himself to start reading from his book, and the lighting is sort of golden, and the smoke is blue. It's really quite beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful. The footage from Argentina is gorgeous. The photographer is really talented. I love it. I forget her last name now, but her first name is Iga, I have to get back to you with her last name, because you'll want to keep track of her in the future.