The Bar

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This is only the second image (of many more to come) we've shot with the characters of Cheryl and Margaret, so it's exciting to get them more in the mix. After five months of shooting and a two month hiatus being focused a new set of characters within the story makes being on set feel fresh again.

The Gang's All Here

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We got the cast back together this past weekend for our first shoot in two months and we'll be shooting again this coming Sunday. We have a very full schedule through the end of the year and as we continue to build our team for the fall everything is looking very promising.

Scanning 482 Negatives

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Week before last I scanned the first 482 4x5 negatives from the project in about 22 hours glued to a computer in the digital labs at the International Center of Photography. I had some leftover TA hours from a year ago that I'd been saving up for just such an occasion. This kind of work requires me to be a machine loading each negative one at a time into a special flexible holder, blowing off the tiny bits of dust you can only see at certain angles of light, placing it into the scanner using these cool little magnetic latches, setting the computer to scan the image which takes a couple minutes, while I wait loading the next negative into a second negative holder and blowing off the dust, unloading the first negative from the scanner, and then loading the next one to scan. Repeat and repeat and repeat. To make the work a little less tedious I tend to put in headphones and listen to a mix of old and new albums that I want to become more intimately familiar with in its details. That week it was:

The National - Trouble Will Find Me

Kanye West - Yeezus

Josh Ritter - The Beast In Its Tracks

Sam Phillips - Push Any Button

The Black Keys - Brothers

Joe Pug - Nation of Heat EP

Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim

The Oh Hellos - Through the Deep, Dark Valley

Iron & Wine - Ghost on Ghost

Jason's Party Timelapse

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Over two days in the living room of my new apartment Emily, Maggie, and I setup and shot a crowded party scene hosted by one of Marc's classmates, Jason. I'm grateful to the cast (1:11) and the eleven extras (1:22) for packing into such a small space to make the party look crowded, putting up with the intense heat even with the A.C. going full blast, and helping me get this shot made. I definitely recommend watching this (and the other timelapse videos) full-screen and in HD so you can see all the little changes to the bits and pieces we're moving around.

Jason's Party Timelapse from T.G. Wilkinson on Vimeo.

9 Shots in 6 Weeks

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We've shot 9 new images since I last posted six week ago, which doubles the total number of scenes we've shot so far. There are a lot of behind the scenes materials from all those shoots that I'm excited to share, but I haven't been able to find the time to post them because of how much time it takes to produce each shoot and get the images themselves made. That seems like it'll be a continual tension I'm going to have to wrestle with, but I'll try to get some of that stuff up soon.

Taxi Cab Timelapse

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We went to CT to shoot using a taxi cab shell from Cars on Location. You can see E.C., one of the set dressing apprentices, hang through the empty windshield several times as he reattaches the rear view mirror in a better position while other set dressing apprentice that day, Nia, done with prepping the car shot some behind the scenes footage. I do a lot of shifting around with the camera while under the dark cloth to change the composition; the silver side of the dark cloth is to keep the sun from building up too much heat under there. The last frame is kind of fun because you can briefly see E.C. and I comparing polaroid test shots of the mirror placement.

Taxi Cab Timelapse from T.G. Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Published the Third Draft

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After three months of rewriting I'm proud to announce that we published the third draft of the script today. Every scene was changed in some way in a full top to bottom rewrite. We gave Marc a better arc for why he moved to New York that spoke to the overall themes of the story and, as a whole, expanded the story arcs of Sally and Wesley's friends. The casting process in particular was extremely helpful to us in fleshing out who these characters were as we got to talk about the characters in the audition room and put faces with names. As a result many of the secondary characters have been fleshed out to the point of becoming main characters with their own tiny arcs.

It was a huge overhaul with no scene left behind. In a quick estimate we cut 17 scenes and wrote 27 brand new scenes for this draft, which even if you exclude what were often large revisions to the scenes that stayed in the script that means at a minimum 42% of what's on the page was written in just the last few months. If I hadn't been working on this script for the last year and a half I would probably feel shaken by how much has changed so quickly, but I've learned in the last eight months that some of the best discoveries in the writing process come in a flurry of writing as you try to get it all down as fast as you can.

What I refer to as the first draft of the script came after a year of writing six days a week in a burst of 7,200 words in which the entire story was re-envisioned beginning to end in a single two hour focused burst at the computer. Major anchor points of the story were uprooted and the script became something dramatically and irreversibly different from what it had been just a short time before—and it was better for it.

The last three months, even as the story changes have remained just as big, has felt like the more mature version of that. The story as it stands today has never rung more true and I've never been more proud of something I've written than what's in this script. It's also a good feeling to know that after a year and a half of steady work at this I have never been a better writer than I am today and it'll probably surprise you to hear that it's an even better feeling to know that that still means I'm probably not very good, but I can say that because I know that I'll be a better writer a year from now and an even better writer the year after that when I tackle my next project.

So here's to the third draft and all the images and all the words ahead!

Beer Flights

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"Always carry whiskey in case of a snake bite...always keep a snake in your pocket." - W.C. Fields

It was three months ago that we locked the second draft of the shooting script for the photo project and I’m happy to report I’m getting really close to publishing the third draft of the script to our actors and creative team, but this is what my writing process is starting to look like these days.