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ChaseTheHorizon
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Name: John
Country: United States
State: Ohio/Indiana
Birthday: 6/3/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Directing, filming, editing, and putting music to movies; playing guitar and writing songs; theater in every aspect; dominating at video games; cheering people up
Expertise: Working on it...
Message: message me
AIM:  clickerid4
Member Since:
4/29/2004
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| Travels.I'm returning to Toledo this coming weekend for a music video shoot with the lovely Meaghan Roberts. How did we not do this sooner? Beats me. Anyway, this weekend will also mark my fourth weekend in a row away from Chicago, and the following weekend will be my only weekend in July when I'm not. Also, one month from Monday, I'll be directing Happily After.
I'm actually rather astounded at how smoothly things are progressing so far on that front. Justin's doing a phenomenal job staying organized and suggesting terrific visual ideas, and by the end of this week we should have a full crew together. As long as casting goes smoothly, all we'll have to worry about are locations, and gratefully it's much easier to find and secure them outside the city. Ah, how I miss the suburbs.
This weekend was a wonderful diversion from work, though. I traveled to Philadelphia - only my second time to the city - to visit my Notre Dame friends for the occasion of our friend Kristin's wedding. Three months from now, I'm in Noble and Claudia's wedding. Being in the thick of wedding planning myself now, it's funny what you look at and what you notice about other people's weddings all of a sudden. Little details. Flowers. The color of ribbons. The intricacies of the dress. What did they do for dinner?
Also, it's funny that you don't realize just how much you've missed someone - or, in this case, a group of people - until you see them for the first time in two or three years. Michael and I couldn't remember the last time we really saw each other. I hadn't seen the New York crowd since last August, during our post-Last Stop road trip. And I don't know how I've gone so long in Chicago without visiting Brad and Brendan in Indianapolis. But, here we all were this weekend, having a ball as if not a day had passed.
When all these movies are done - Sleepless Night, Happily After, Separation Anxiety, and perhaps the Cincy feature Chester Haul to top it off in the winter - I really will need a longer vacation. A real one, not a working-from-home one. Sooner or later, I suppose. And maybe even a bit of Chicago time.
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| Taking a break from the crazy.NOW it feels like something's happening.
After a truly blissful weekend with Chicago friends up in Traverse City for Fourth of July celebrations, I've been virtually unstoppable so far this week. I think I just got fed up with narrative projects either pushing their dates back, not scheduling dates at all, or being altogether non-communicative with their crews, and so I've become a one-man wrecking crew to counter-balance the ripples of stupid.
Happily After's moving forward very quickly, on track for an August 20 start date. Whether or not I can direct a feature film on a sub-$10k budget remains a mystery, but I've stopped worrying about it and started thinking of all the ways we can simply make it happen. Auditions are toward the end of July, with a final script rewrite slated for the month while we connect those remaining loose ends and emotional threads, and I couldn't be more excited about it...
...except I'm even more excited about Separation Anxiety. With a new draft in our hands ready to go and a revised investor packet, and the LLC paperwork going through at the end of the week, we're officially in pre-production. With each draft, the script has improved tremendously, and as casting is finalized this month, I'm more than confident we'll be able to make this happen. I simply can't believe I'm blessed to work on a script this good, to be honest. Production is slated to begin October 23.
All that, and I'm shooting a music video for Meaghan Roberts next week and a short film with Reel Buckeye Productions in Columbus at the end of the month. I don't know if I'll be doing this forever, but right now, it's damn cool to be doing it.
"And here...we...GO."
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| it's who we are now, who we areI don't think any song more accurately sums up so many facets of a life all at once.
Well, I'm back from Los Angeles after a 48-hour stint in the city, and it's nice to be reminded of how disgusting that city is and how unhappy I would be living there. It's odd, but it's a nice affirmation of my decision to stay in Chicago and make my way as a filmmaker here. I just don't think I could tolerate cockroaches on the sidewalk and smog in the morning and assholes clogging the career path.
But my, those mountains are pretty. On our flight home, we flew within spitting distance of Pike's Peak, which was some kind of awe-inspiring. One of these days, I'd love to write a script set in the mountains and just take a road trip with a small cast and crew to film it. I feel like I'm missing a crucial landscape from my demo reel by not highlighting such majestic terrain.
Anyway, I'm off. Time to make stuff happen. | | |
| can we take a ride and get outta this place while we still have timeWow.
Not more than a four hour plane ride, and just like that, I am a country's length away.
Los Angeles doesn't look or feel any differently than when I left it four years ago. Currently, I'm just north of Culver City, and the Hollywood sign is visible a few miles in the distance. To think...four summers ago, I lived on the other side of those mountains, worked on the Warner Bros. lot, inexplicably fell for a girl via the wonder of two-hour phone conversations, and allowed the seeds of a cinematographer's mind to grow a film that would later turn into Glass City.
It's still smoggy as hell. And I'm jet-lagged.
But it's surreal to have a shoot here.
and in the darkest night
if my memory serves me right
i'll never turn back time
forgetting you
but not the time... | | |
| Reminiscing, Part 2.Third Eye Blind's new song, "Don't Believe a Word," is so new I can't even select it as a "Currently Listening To" icon on Xanga. But that's what's running non-stop on my playlist right now.
This may be the fifth or sixth entry I've written on how amazed I am at music's ability to define a time period in a person's life. For me, Third Eye Blind's Out of the Vein album was all that mattered in the fall of 2004, the period of post-Five Year Summer angst that brought the end of my longest college-bound relationship, the near-end of my time in theater, and a painstakingly slow journey into rediscovering myself. I used "Good Man" as the transition song in my Directing: Process final, a staging of two scenes from David Mamet's Oleanna, an odd bit of foreshadowing for the breakup that would follow the last performance. I still play "Wake For Young Souls" on the guitar on a fairly regular basis, but my favorite memory of that song comes from playing it at my usual New Years bash for Nicki to end that rollercoaster of a year. Where does time go now, indeed.
Being engaged, strangely enough, has brought a lot of these memories to the foreground. I've never understood the High Fidelity urge to seek out past loves and apologize, to figure out what I might have done wrong in those relationships through some kind of emotional self-flaggelation. I've done a fine job of figuring it out on my own, and a fine job of atoning for those mistakes. And I know I don't have to prove myself to anyone, except for Kathleen, the one person who would never ask that of me. I'm happy. I've been happy for a really long time.
I guess, once in a while, I think back on those past relationships, and wish the same for them, and hope I didn't wrong them so much that I stole part of that possibility away for a short while.
Let the truth blow like a hurricane through me.
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