Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The Final(s) Countdown

Well, it has been quite a May so far. You might even call it A-MAY-ZING.

You could. I wouldn't.

But I would call it busy. A lot has gone down in the weeks since a bomb scare at USC forced me to BS with my friends in Subway across from campus rather than BS with my friends on campus, but I won't get into too much yet. Let's go back FINALS WEEK.

Ba-ba-bum! (cue scary music)

Actually, finals week isn't all that scary in film school. Busy? Yes. A lot of work? You bet. But scary in the "If I don't stay up all night and cram I'll never be a doctor/lawyer/marine biologist!" way? Nope.

Its just deadlines - everything's due. I had a rough cut of my film due for 533 directing class and a final version of my feature script for screenwriting. I did have an actual Blue Book-style final exam for my critical studies class, but that's not so frightening. I mean, its a CLASS where we WATCH MOVIES. I sweated it out over way too many Ion quizzes in high school chemistry to get scared by a test on MOVIES.

Anyway, for the film I was shooting, tentatively entitled "The AK", I am working with an editor and between our schedules we were only able to get together a rough assembly of the footage for my class.

Essentially, the assembly is when the editor simply puts the clips together in order with no real editorial decisions being made. They're usually pretty dull and just help give a rough idea about what was shot.

That said, the assembly went over very well in my class. People laughed at the funny stuff and seemed genuinely interested at the more dramatic scenes. Now, its was still very long and much work to be done, but was really happy to get mostly positive feedback on what we shot.

Anyway, its been a while since I've rolled up on MGH mostly because almost immediately following my final final exam (the blue book movie one) we had the 547 documentary screenings at USC. And as, a former 547 producer and with one of my best buds as one of this semester's directors, I had a formal obligation to go and get drunk and have a great time.

The doc screenings kicked off a pretty crazy week of end-of-semester screenings and parties that carried through for almost seven straight days. It was kind of excessive, but ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE JACK A DULL BOY

Am I right?

Hopefully I'll have time to write more about the week o' fun and screenings before returning to the Windy City.

Either way, its getting kinda crazy because after this past string of finals I'll only have ONE MORE finals week in December before being done with film school forever. Holy crap: I'm going to be done in December! There's no way I'll take another semester in Spring of '11!


OR....WILL I?


?


Ba-ba-bum! (cue scary music)....