Beach
Heard back from most cast members, got everyone I wanted so far mashAllah. Jonathan can’t make it until past five weekdays, so I went down to the beach today to see how it would look if we started filming around 5:30. Tide will be dead low and shooting will be during golden hour – I know I’ll wish I had a brute or something out there so I’m concerned about what I’m doing for lights, but it’ll have a much better effect than the full daytime scenes. I’m pleased. I feel like now I understand something more better about how the film should look and feel.
If we push that back we can also get a couple people to PA who couldn’t before, I managed to land a sound dog and our microphone should be shipping from New Jersey. Everything’s going better than expected.
I’m the worst at schedules and going after people trying to get definite responses, though – next shoot I’m hiring an AD, I don’t care how much I have to pay them. The entire budget could just be for AD even, I don’t care.
I experimented a little with the iPhone – it really is a beautiful camera and one that I respond to and understand. I’m very grateful that I can own such a thing, I never imagined that I could have something so expensive and trendy. It makes me feel good to have one.
All of these were completely untouched, just point and shoot:
(Of course it’s not going to be all dark and contrasty in the short – although wouldn’t that look cool? – more attention will be paid to composition and so on. It’s just that I was playing with light.)
I’ve been to that beach many times, once or twice a week at least when the weather is good. My grandmother is very poor. She collects sea glass to make things out of to sell so that she can eat – they cut her food stamps back by fifty dollars this month even – and pay her bills. We go there and I help her look, or mostly I play around and if I spot something I pick it up. I always have less than she does by at least a third, even though she’s on an oxygen tank and can’t walk far, and I can run around and will often go more than a mile away just following the shore. But every time I go there, even if we park in the same place and use the same stairs down onto the sand, I can only barely recognize it … the beach is changeable, it changes every day. I see the tide come in and out in a different way – if I was there yesterday, somehow the next day there’ll be just as much seaglass even if we got it all. The tides brought it in or the winds changed and things were uncovered from the sand.
It’s sobering to try and film by the ocean, which is why I think it’s not as often used – your passions, the private beauty of your life is so small. Even if you dedicated yourself to filming this beach, the way you see it, you would never be able to capture it all – obvious things like the light would never look exactly right, the framing isn’t quite what you see with the human eye, and then smaller things and impossible things like the feeling of the wind and the kind of memories it brings up in you. And then even if you tried, an hour later the beach would have changed. I always wished to film here because it’s a familiar landscape to me, but I hope the day I pick is somehow the right one – each day here has such depth and complexity, and there’s no way to predict it. I don’t want to go back and see something beautiful the next week and wish that it had been that day instead. I just don’t want to make myself sad.
(I think about this amazing lecture from Paradise Found: A Documentary on Islamic Architecture –
“Fountain for fountain, palace for palace, garden for garden, all of it is an attempt to imagine the Islamic paradise, and in effort to fulfill the Islamic obligation to build that Paradise on Earth. You must have noticed that you never see ugliness in Islamic art; neurosis or personal problems, or any of that dark stuff that so obsesses Western artists. Islamic art always, always tries to look as beautiful as it can. Why? Because it recognizes that the problems of the artist are just storms in a teacup, utterly irrelevant in the wider scheme of things. In the end, all that matters is the beauty of God.”)
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