Dagzilla

I headed upstream from lake sylvia, the sun just breaking through the clouds as a rare treat in western Washington this time of year. I went downstream a few days ago on a marvelous and fairly technical single track trail that I was delighted to find was not restricted to hikers only, due to its soft surface and no doubt nearly permanently wet condition. The upstream trail, which departs from the north end of lake sylvia, winds up the stream that feeds the lake skirting clearcut logging areas but if you stay near the creek you can imagine the glimpses of open space are the result of the recent wind storm which actually did take down a noticeable amount of timber, in addition to a bridge or two as the photo illustrates.

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Back in Seattle town

Originally uploaded by nineminus2

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Saturday I helped put on the Rufskin spring fashion show at Rich’s where I used to be the club manager. This is the third year I’ve helped with the show, the first year I shot photos, the second I did video and this year I helped design and build the stage, shot some photos and shot and edited the video.

It was a good project because I finally had the opportunity to really dig into Apple Motion and do some editing using Final Cut Studio. It was rather time consuming on my G5 Powerbook though - compressing some of the video afterwards took many hours and some trial-and-error to get the compression right for YouTube.

The boys at Rufskin seemed pretty happy with the results and I’m excited to try out DVD Studio Pro to master the final video.

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Today I went to the open house for San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking (SFSDF). This is a small digital film school located a bit south of San Francisco. After visiting LA Film, USC, UCLA and AFI, I was expecting something equal to those in size and presentation but the small door and winding hallways leading to the four or five room space was quite different. They have one large sound stage, a smaller shooting room, an editing room and offices. Pretty bare-bones compared to the other schools. They are 100% digital which they market as progressive and given recent advances in technology like the Red Camera which make better-than-high-def digital film affordable, I do think film is on the verge that photography was when I started shooting with my first digital SLR almost ten years ago.

This of course poses another dilemma in my decision: film/digital. Do I invest in learning film which is still ingrained and held strong in the main-stream film community or make the leap?

The one thing that struck me about this school was the two founders who gave the tour and also do much of the teaching. You could tell they were very passionate about filmmaking and this would no doubt be a fun experience. After the tour I stayed for a screening of shorts by current students. While I had higher expectations for the screening, they were students working on some of their first films.

SFSDF’s year-long program starts twice a year, the next session beginning March 23rd. Students produce several shorts and then have the opportunity to either produce a ‘thesis film’ or crew on a feature film with roughly a half-million dollar budget produced by the school.

This week I’m hoping to visit SFSU and SF Art Institute.

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I fell asleep early last night while watching ‘Seinfeld’ in bed with Bill. When I woke he was gone to his meetings so I wrote a thank you note and headed back to Hollywood to the Los Angeles Film School for the open house. It was basically the same tour I had last week except that at each stop there was an instructor who gave a short presentation and answered questions. At the beginning of the tour there was also a Q&A with four of their alumni, two of which were responsible for creating the short Blockbusters which apparently generated some good press for them and got them an interview with Spielberg and almost landed them a job with SKG.

The program at LA Film looks like it would be a lot of fun and pretty intensive, but I still have my reservations, considering that most of the students are fresh out of high school and there really is no selection criteria, except that each student needs adequate funding. This is in contrast to a school like American Film Institute which sees a considerable number of applicants for the limited acceptance pool.

My boyfriend suggested I do the LA Film program for a year and then use the work from projects completed between now and December to apply to AFI. That would mean I’d be in film school for well over three years, quite a commitment and very expensive!

I’m at Starbucks now in West Hollywood. This place is more cruisy than a gay bar. I’m just deciding now what to do with the rest of the day. It’s a beautiful day out, more than 80 degrees, but I’m not too inclined to spend the rest of the day behind the wheel in my 87 BMW with no air, more than likely stuck in traffic heading back to San Diego. Like the rest of my day here in LA, things with film school are definitely still up in the air!

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Just woke up here at the Hyatt Regency in Hollywood - getting ready for one more film school tour and then i’ll be back to San Diego.

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