your rebellion is resultless so be angry at yourself

hisashiburi desu yo! minasan komban wa,
so as you know the script is done but i'm not sure anyone's read it yet, but neither have my actors so it's ok, we're working on it. in the mean time i've found a few more locations. i think, since last i've posted, megan and i looked at this spot she wanted to show me, it was great! and no wild dogs this time!

also, i've secured an actress for Dave's girlfriend, named Angie in the script, will be played by Julie Lehenbauer. she's excited about it i think, so that's good, i gave her the low-down on her part and she seemed to like it. also(big news), i think i FINALLY have a person in mind for the main character, apply named MP (male protagonist, not military police. however there will be an edit to the script to include a reference to military police). i'm gonna talk to him about it tomorrow, so cross our fingers. I wish I could use Andy again, but that's just not going to work, I think this other person will work well though, so we'll see. let you know how it goes convincing him.

negative news, found out from my district manager that it's against corporate policy to shoot any kind of photo or video inside the store, so i emailed Gamestop's PR office lady asking her to speak to me about working something out, so wish me luck, waiting to find out about that.

uuuuhhhhhhh i dont know. i think i'm getting unwell, not from this project or anything relevant to this blog at all, but i'm not sure, but a bit concerned.

OH, i remember what i was going to say. I'm gonna be starting my JET application pretty hardcore here soon, so that'll be fun! a lot of writing and rewriting and perfecting paperwork! for those of you who don't know, JET is a program for post-grads to go to Japan and teach english to students for a year at a time. i'm thinking of doing that for a year then coming back to grad school. so it's exciting, but like i said, lots of work, a very arduous application i'm told.
http://www.jetprogram.org/

aaaand as far as my research project. i've gotten a couple good books on contemporary Japanese and East-Asian cinema that should be good reads, so i'll probably focus on that. to be specific:
"Contemporary Asian Cinema" and
"Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film" which has a whole chapter on the director of Bright Future (Akarui Mirai), so that's cool. havent gotten a chance to look at them too much. or for that matter, havent gotten a chance to watch much movies lately. i'll be honest, i've gotten into LOST a little bit. I'm kind of embarrassed about it, but it's so addicting, which is why i never wanted to start watching it in the first place. but i'm trying not to let it interfere with anything else, aside from taking away from watching better things. anyway, i think i may quit cold-turkey this week. just finish season 3... haha, i dont know.

I did however download Shiki-Jitsu, the film Hideaki Anno made after Love&Pop, it looks real relevant, so i'm gonna watch that sometime in the net few days. i also ordered this cool "50 Movie Pack: Nightmare Worlds!" It looks like some real good public domain fodder, here's a link:
http://www.amazon.com/Nightmare-Worlds-Movie-Pack-Collection/dp/B000H5U68O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1254197185&sr=8-1
and i'm also gonna order the 50 movie pack for Sci-fi also, read the script and you'll see where this all comes into play. i also just wanna see these classy old films for personal enjoyment, i've read they're mostly pretty bad!

began learning some Korean this week! i can say a couple things. also, i decided my side goals for this year are also learning some basic Maya, getting better with After Effects, and learning how to use a tablet to paint with Photoshop, AND finally learn how to vector in Illustrator. So i'm sure some of you can help with that or know good sites or programs to help learn, let me know about that later though, too busy for it now. anyway, none of that really pertains to my thesis work, it's just side little personal goals. all those things, learn some basic Korean, learn more Japanese and Kanji and hopefully get a show for my photography from Japan. just so you know.

my upstairs neihbor stomps around a lot

So just a few quick things:
checked out a few locations today, that Tower Park at 77th and Holmes was nothing too exciting, but a few blocks south, there was a very cool abandoned school, which i think Frank mentioned, that i liked a lot.
on another note, i watched Gigantic this afternoon/evening, film by Matt Aselton, starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, and John Goodman. it was actually pretty good. it wasn't one of my new favorite movies ever, but it had a lot of redeeming qualities, good characters, good cinematography (with a few very exceptional shots here and there).
as for now, as it becomes bedtime, i am taking part in my quarterly watching of 300!
suuuuuuuper tired-

And if there was progress to be made we'd make it under the assumption that we're making progress on the improgressive reality of my progress

yeah, make sense of that! i can't!
but anyway, as per an anonymous request, here's some more news:
easy stuff first, here's some movies i've been watching,
"Nobody Knows (Dare mo Shiranai)" by Hirokazu Koreeda, it's a movie based on a true story about a single woman who has to hide the fact that she has 4 children in order to find a place to live. but then she abandons them and leaves her oldest 12 year old son in charge of taking care of the younger three, it's super sad, but a really good movie, exactly my style of story telling and cinematography, i liked it a lot.
Other than that, really haven't watched anything super interesting that i can remember. watched Bright Future (Akarui Mirai) again, good as usual, studied it for the imagination/reality interchange, found some good ideas.
Watched part of The Time Machine (old one) and was just kind of disappointed in how it was going to I didn't finish it.

In other news, script is ALMOST all laid out. I really wish it would have been done by now, but with being busy with other classes and work and crap, it's just not. It's really hard to get into that meditative mind of being able to concentrate on it. But it should be done within days.
Technical explorations will be conducted this week. Testing shooting in low light, and different kinds of audio recording because i really don't like doing it and/or don't know enough about it.
But I have found some good locations, Mimi's actual room will be her character's room in the movie, it works out just right. Also found just some random spots for outdoor locations, photographed a bit. still looking for a good merry-go-round, so let me know.
Although it's kind of a waste of time probably at this point, i've been doing lots of research to try to come up with ideas for a title/character names. like i mentioned about the light-related character names. things like that, looking through books about symbolism, not like symbolism in art and crap like that, but like traditional and ancient symbols.

I think the biggest reason that the script writing is going a bit slow right towards the end of it is because i just want to be real serious about it and make sure it's absolutely as good as i can make it. I mean, as artists we're always coming up with better ideas, but for the time being, i want this work to be the best my current state can produce. So i keep thinking about it and thinking about and thinking about thinking that it's still not quite good enough, that it needs just a bit more, that it needs something. so anyway, i hope that's legitimate, i know it needs to get going, i don't want to be shooting in winter, so...

also on another note, i had a very very nice surprise last night when my friend Keiichi Hashimoto, who chloe and i stayed with in japan, called me on skype! we got to talk and see each other for about an hour and just chat and catch up and practice some jap-english together. it was great, i really miss him. we somewhat jokingly talked of having him come to America and stay with us so we can have a joint photography show together, him and chloe and i. that would be awesome, but we'll see what happens, that would be real expensive for him obviously.
and in my spare time i have made for myself this past week and a half or so (which has been about 4 hours total) i have finally gotten a chance to try Fallout 3, awesome game and I can't wait til winter break when i have time to actually play more. and i also got back into a little old hobby of Gunpla, Gundam modeling. excited about that too, but again, more excited for having more time for it someday in the future.

keep thinking and i think, dakara, i am da ne.

Some progress:

I've got a minute, so I'll go over some progress from the week. After hitting a wall with the script-writing a little bit, I've figured some more aspects out and approaching it in a much simpler way and it's coming along again. And I'm happy with how it's going, so onward.
I still don't have an idea for who's going to play the male main character though, so that's something I'm still trying to figure out. Also, names for the two main characters, I'm trying to think of names that could have some association to light or the sun...something like that. I've tryed doing some research into mythology and old world religions terms for characters or gods associated with light, but that hasn't really worked out, all the names are too goofy, they would just sound weird. So I'm open to any ideas.
In other news, I got my 35mm film from this summer developed, so I've spent 2 days scanning negatives but I'm finally done with that! And I've got a hand full of real good images I'm excited about, so it's been good working with those for a couple days. I'll be getting my application in ASAP for the KCAI crossroads gallery, to show Chloe and I's photos in November hopefully, if not maybe in the spring.

Main goals for the moment: finish script, scout some locations and secure locations, figure out actors and names!