One Too Many Mornings - a new comedy.

Making this film has been kind of like a very long marathon. We’ve been moving along at our own pace. Now that the finish line is in sight, we are sprinting as hard and as fast as we can.

The beginning of this week found us focused on the music for the film. I was emailing back and forth with Mark Harrison and Darin Seal of my favorite band Capybara. They were snowed-in in Kansas City working overtime on the score. I’m excited to share one of their cues from the film below.

Thursday was my 30th birthday, and I was woken up at 7:15am by knock on my door. It was a photographer from the LA Times, that I was not expecting until 10. The week prior, I was interviewed for an article that I was told may or may not get published. So apparently it must be going to print, and I guess my picture will be next to it? At any rate, I tried my best to look natural in a situation that is completely posed. I’m not comfortable with this part. I don’t know if I ever will be.

I also realized this week, after doing our 2nd pass on the color correction, that the screens in Park City are significantly larger than the screen on my laptop. So I called on our good friend Tucker Marolf, who helped out on set one too many weekends to see if we could crash his work to check out the film on a real HD monitor.

We had scheduled time to go to Tucker’s work on Friday the 18th. This was also the day of my wife’s company party that I had been planning on doing. At this point, the movie is in Sundance, we only have a few days left to finish it, I was really stressed out, and I had to cancel.

Well, turns out, there was no company party. My wife had planned a surprise birthday party that night for me.

I was floored. I was so touched, but also so sad that my life had gotten so busy that I couldn’t live a normal life where I could see my friends on a Friday night. Because there’s been a lot of nights like this along this road. The last two years I’ve hung out with my friends a fraction of the time I had before.

This really brings me to an important point – this is for all the people that are looking at our story and being inspired to make their own films. You need to know this going in – the sacrifice you make to tell your stories is real. And you’re not the only one making sacrifices, your loved ones do to. The nights I’ve worked until 2 in the morning, and come home to my wife already asleep – that sucks for her too. Every summer that has gone by where I haven’t visited my family – where I haven’t been able to partake in seeing my little niece get older – this was sacrificed in favor of me devoting my life to this thing. And along the way I wondered multiple times if it was all worth it.

So if you really want to see your projects through, you really do end up giving away a tangible and large piece of yourself to it. A two year sacrifice boiled down to a 78 minute experience for an unmeasurable audience. It’s crazy if you think about it.

I’m thankful that I still love this story, and I’m thankful that Sundance is allowing us a forum to tell this story to a much larger audience than we would have otherwise, but I’m extra thankful to all of my friends and family who I really didn’t see enough of throughout this journey, and who still remained 100% supportive even if I was only there 20% of the time. The finish line is really in sight. It’s this Tuesday.

-mm

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.