It's been another week of ups and down. Not coincidentally, I feel up when I'm not at work and down when I'm in the office. So why don't I do you all a favor and just talk about the out-of-office experience.

This weekend, I had my baptism of fire with real motion-picture cameras. I took Friday off work, and rented a 1950s Bolex 16mm camera, a Walkman DAT and a microphone, and spent four chilly hours lugging this equipment around Fisherman's Wharf, capturing images and sound. It went about as well as could be expected, given it's my first time. I'm not actually sure that my footage will come out though, since about half way through the morning, the camera door suddenly fell open, exposing some of my film! I had 100 feet (about three minutes worth), and I'm hoping that only the two or three feet at the extremities of each camera spool were exposed.

The Bolex 16mm Camera

The next step is to ship the film off for processing and transfer the DAT tape to magnetic tape. And then I'll be doing the old-fashioned cutting and splicing of film on a "flatbet" (the jargon is starting to roll off my tongue now, although I draw the line at calling marker pens "sharpies".)

The next day was even more exhausting. Film-making is very hard work! Saturday was the day of our collaborative class film-project. We all rendezvoused at 8.30 at the Film Arts Foundation facility on 9th Street, and spent the following nine hours in and about the premises filming with two different 16mm cameras, capturing sound on a magnetic tape drive, and playing with lights and camera meters.

We had a three page script for our project, and I was one of the two actors. In the morning, I wasn't in any of the scenes, so I got to take my turns as director, director of photography (cameraman), assistant-cameraman, sound supervisor, and boom- operator. The morning was so chaotic, since we were filming half the shots from one side of 9th St, while the action took place across the street. And 9th Street is a busy five-lane road; whose idea was this! We wasted half our time trying to shout instructions to each other across the traffic, or waiting for breaks in the traffic so we could run intrepidly across the street with our heavy equipment.

We were all making mistakes. Somebody had the light meter set for the wrong speed of film, so towards noon, we realized that we'd been over-exposing many of our shots. During my second stint as director of photography, I inadvertently left the camera running. Sixty feet of film (worth about $20) before somebody noticed! To cap it all, right before lunch we suddenly realized that, although the footage meter on the camera read 260 ft, we'd actually only loaded a 100 foot spool in there; so we'd been filming onto blank air for the last hour and a half. At least that meant that I hadn't wasted any film after all!

The afternoon was fun for me, because I could relax and just be an actor. The other actor was a cute straight woman named Camille with whom I'd already established a good rapport, so we had a good time screwing up takes and making everybody laugh. The final film, if we ever assemble it, will probably look rather comical because I'm a good forteen inches taller than Camille.