Saturday was to be the big day, the day when I'd shoot my new short movie for my film-class. But by Friday, I still hadn't heard back from the property manager of the building complex where I wanted to shoot. I was about to assume that hearing not was tantamount to approval when, towards the end of Friday, they finally called me. They were worried, the caller, a woman, said. Thinking, at first, that they probably thought that I'd have an enormous crew of light and sound engineers, makeup, the I told her that there'd just be me, a small camera on a tripod and the two actors. That assuaged her worries a little, but she was still concerned; what if one of us fell off the skybridge or something? In the end, she let me go ahead, but I had to s something to the effect that we wouldn't hold them liable for any accidents, and I promised to keep the shoot as short as possible.

That night, I slept poorly. Here, I'd made all these preparations, and now I was worried that either the building management, or a resident would interrupt us mid-shoot and chase us away. I'd promised to keep the shoot short, but I knew that, real lly, it would take at least three hours. As it happens, we experienced no problems with the length of the shoot at all. There was one guy who looked like he wanted to kick us off - he hovered around with a sour look on his face. Probably one of those typ who live in high-rise apartment buildings and hate to see anybody else having fun. But he evidently felt outnumbered and declined to interrupt us.

The main problem turned out to be something unexpected. I'd anticipated problems with light, or people trying to interfere, and I'd even anticipated that James and Jimmy would have two left feet each and wouldn't be able to waltz convincingly on f ut I hadn't imagined that it would turn out to be so cold! The day felt fine in the morning - a little breezy, but typical weather for this time of year. But during the afternoon, it became overcast, and a cold wind blew between the downtown buildings. the end of the shoot, I was so cold that my fingers could barely even operate the camera controls. In between the shots, James and Jimmy would hide behind a fence to escape the wind. For the final set of shots, where I had to shoot in a particularly d location, I ended up rushing things - at that point, my sense of cold had taken over, and I no longer cared if I got the perfect shot or not.

Here we are recovering after the shoot with Starbucks hot chocolate.

After our Starbucks, I started to download the thirty or so different camera shots onto my computer, and edit them for length. When you're assembling these little shots together, and gradually putting them into sequence, you still don't have a cle a of how effective your ideas have translated to film. Really, it wasn't until late in the afternoon, just as Brett was walking in the door (I was taking him out for dinner to celebrate his birthday), that I'd created the first rough cut, with music. B and I watched it together, and, I have to say, I was bowled over. It worked exactly as I'd hoped; but even more, there was a kind of uplifting power to it that I hadn't really expected. Either I was crazy, or this was actually pretty good! Brett was lp - all he could say is, why weren't the two guys holding hands at the end?

Saturday night, I couldn't sleep again, but for entirely different reasons than Friday night. The steak and sparkling wine certainly didn't help, but the real reason wa nse of exhilaration. It gave me such a confidence boost to think that I could come up with my own idea, plan it all out, execute it, and end up with something worth showing.

After more tweaking, and a better edit on Sunday, I took a copy into work with me on CD this morning. This was the test. Did anybody else like it except me? I copied the mpeg version of the movie to a networked hard-drive, and sent round an email ple I'm friendly with at work asking them to take a look. And people seemed to really like it! Someone wrote "It's marvelous...what fun, what spirit. Sends a great message for the current sense of fear going on in this country." I have to te you, that made me feel wonderful. It amazes me to think of the power of film: when you're filming it, it seems like nothing: a single shot of James walking for example. But when you assemble everything into two and a half concentrated minutes, you c e such an effect on people.

A still from early in the movie.