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Different Styles of Team
Jul. 6th, 2011 02:04 amVery tired. By coincidence, this is the week of my quarterly evaluation at work and is also the last week and a half of postproduction on the film. So I'm going to be evaluated at my most sleepless and distracted. (I'm not worried; it's just extra pressure.)
Basically, I wake up at noon, eat quickly, and work on the film until 3:30, turning around whatever Ciro needs me to turn around and while Ciro works on whatever I need to turn around. Then he goes to the mixing studio and I do caption work, in both cases interspersed with occasional bouts of waiting for things that are necessary to do the next thing. In these times I fit in the absolute necessaries like eating and seeing to it I have clean underwear. (Showering has not managed to fit in a few days and is moving to the top of the "necessary" list, edging out breakfast tomorrow if it must.)
Ciro and I are both free around 2 a.m., so we talk on the phone for one to five hours to come up with plans of attack for whatever disasters have come up that day. Ciro is getting even less sleep than me, partly because I have a hard biological limit and partly because he has the computer with the software that can do most of the things we need. It is a thin, hard time.
One of the advantages of Ciro and I both being solid all-around filmmakers who can work in any crew position and who find each other's logical, financial, and artistic choices solid is that we can be one entity in two places. However, we are finding that this might be eclipsed by the gains to productivity and well being we get by being able to touch each other in stressful moments, or watch each other's simultaneous reaction to hearing or seeing something for the first time. It is possible we will need to adjust workflow accordingly in future. This surprises Ciro more than it does me, but I also find it somewhat surprising.* I suppose it is analogous to the different strategies one uses in sprinting and endurance running.
Scarlett's trip to the beach apparently had far too many people and far too many sand flies to be relaxing, although she did get to buy a lobster directly from a fisherman. She also had to help a client recover from shock, as the client was hit by a car on the way to the appointment (and is fine, and has been sent to an emergency room anyway to double check). We recovered from our reciprocal stressful days with fried pickles.
Dad has drilled out some of the tile in my bathroom to check what's underneath and discovered an old inch-thick mud job (mud as in the clay one uses to lay tile, not wet dirt). We suspected we would find this, given the slight step up into the bathroom, and the fact that we were right lets us do what we hoped we could do when re-tiling, but I had not realized previous to this process that mud had advanced so much so recently. I saw how thin even old grout is; that with the fact that floor tiles stay on the ground, where gravity works in their favor, meant it didn't occur to me one once had to float them on a thick clay layer. (Modern clays use layers that are indeed as thin as the grout; this is what I have worked with before when making mosaics.) Dad says the layer of mud is why tiles were for the wealthy through much of history - not the cost of the tile, but the cost and installation of that thick layer of mud.
* I am not talking about "I miss my spouse," which of course was expected. What I am talking about is hard to put words to and is probably best understood as the artistic energy of having a close collaborator in the same room even if you are doing separate things - linked to the reasons writers like to go to coffee shops, but stronger. Ciro finds to his surprise that this very hard work would be easier if I was walking in and out of the room occasionally, whereas one might more likely predict that would be a distraction. He has not, to my knowledge, tended to have major artistic partnerships in his life previous to me, but to be more of a soloist, whereas I have been constantly in and out of choirs and troupes and bands and co-authored stories.
Basically, I wake up at noon, eat quickly, and work on the film until 3:30, turning around whatever Ciro needs me to turn around and while Ciro works on whatever I need to turn around. Then he goes to the mixing studio and I do caption work, in both cases interspersed with occasional bouts of waiting for things that are necessary to do the next thing. In these times I fit in the absolute necessaries like eating and seeing to it I have clean underwear. (Showering has not managed to fit in a few days and is moving to the top of the "necessary" list, edging out breakfast tomorrow if it must.)
Ciro and I are both free around 2 a.m., so we talk on the phone for one to five hours to come up with plans of attack for whatever disasters have come up that day. Ciro is getting even less sleep than me, partly because I have a hard biological limit and partly because he has the computer with the software that can do most of the things we need. It is a thin, hard time.
One of the advantages of Ciro and I both being solid all-around filmmakers who can work in any crew position and who find each other's logical, financial, and artistic choices solid is that we can be one entity in two places. However, we are finding that this might be eclipsed by the gains to productivity and well being we get by being able to touch each other in stressful moments, or watch each other's simultaneous reaction to hearing or seeing something for the first time. It is possible we will need to adjust workflow accordingly in future. This surprises Ciro more than it does me, but I also find it somewhat surprising.* I suppose it is analogous to the different strategies one uses in sprinting and endurance running.
Scarlett's trip to the beach apparently had far too many people and far too many sand flies to be relaxing, although she did get to buy a lobster directly from a fisherman. She also had to help a client recover from shock, as the client was hit by a car on the way to the appointment (and is fine, and has been sent to an emergency room anyway to double check). We recovered from our reciprocal stressful days with fried pickles.
Dad has drilled out some of the tile in my bathroom to check what's underneath and discovered an old inch-thick mud job (mud as in the clay one uses to lay tile, not wet dirt). We suspected we would find this, given the slight step up into the bathroom, and the fact that we were right lets us do what we hoped we could do when re-tiling, but I had not realized previous to this process that mud had advanced so much so recently. I saw how thin even old grout is; that with the fact that floor tiles stay on the ground, where gravity works in their favor, meant it didn't occur to me one once had to float them on a thick clay layer. (Modern clays use layers that are indeed as thin as the grout; this is what I have worked with before when making mosaics.) Dad says the layer of mud is why tiles were for the wealthy through much of history - not the cost of the tile, but the cost and installation of that thick layer of mud.
* I am not talking about "I miss my spouse," which of course was expected. What I am talking about is hard to put words to and is probably best understood as the artistic energy of having a close collaborator in the same room even if you are doing separate things - linked to the reasons writers like to go to coffee shops, but stronger. Ciro finds to his surprise that this very hard work would be easier if I was walking in and out of the room occasionally, whereas one might more likely predict that would be a distraction. He has not, to my knowledge, tended to have major artistic partnerships in his life previous to me, but to be more of a soloist, whereas I have been constantly in and out of choirs and troupes and bands and co-authored stories.
