Christmas in July!

Merry Christmas in July!

So I spent the weekend with my parents at our camper. We celebrated Christmas in July there because we're cool like that. If I don't get the pictures to upload tonight, I'll be sure and get them on by tomorrow. I'm waiting for them to upload to Walgreens so my mom can pick them up and have hard copies to show to everyone since we won first place in the outdoor decorating contest. We go a little nuts, in case you haven't seen my house at Christmas. It's a lot of work, but fun. Like my internship!

Speaking of, I didn't do any real hard work on Friday. We had a rigging seminar on Friday from Bill Sapsis Rigging Inc. The actual Bill Sapsis came and lead our session, and it was both interesting and humbling to learn about the safety of rigging. However, the information he told us over an 8 hour period got a tad long and I may have drifted off during some of his personal stories and some of the more dry, detailed technical information. It's mostly because I don't understand everything that he was saying because I've done essentially no work with rigging unless you count using our two janky fly pipes at GAC. Either way, I took 3 pages of notes on rigging and received a packet to help me remember it all, so I should be good should I ever get the chance to work in rigging. However, I decided that being a stagehand and working in rigging in particular is probably not a life path I would like to take. This is partly because the average life span of riggers is shorter than that of non-riggers. Blame the careless of the injured individual or of any of the dozens of people who touch the rigging and safety equipment that s/he is relying on. I just don't trust anyone enough to put myself into such dangerous positions and trust that everyone else has done their job to perfection so as to ensure my safety. Basically, I just assume that people like shortcuts and being lazy, which means that things don't always get done up to par. That means safety is not always first. I know it sounds overly cliche, but when your life is on the line, safety matters. I don't feel that I can really share much more about the rigging online, but if you want to talk to me about it, I would love to have a conversation with you. Call me!

This weekend also included a meeting for a group senior honors project that my classmates and I are doing. I'm very excited about the project myself and am hoping that everyone stays as dedicated to it this fall as they are now. We're busy, but we're trying to make time for it anyway. I've been mostly listening to music, which is helpful for me, but I really need to get more organized and start selecting pieces for others to listen to. I shared a few things with the group, which got mostly positive responses. I still need to send the directors my links so they can listen more in their leisure time (if they can find the time) because I want them to form real opinions and give me honest feedback. This is my first sound design and I will not be offended if they don't think my music choice matches what they are thinking for the scenes. I want to stimulate conversation, not force musical choices on them. I need a mood from them to get me started, but since I haven't gotten that from everyone, I've just started making a few selections on my own. I'm certainly not married to them and in fact don't even like all of them. It's very hard to get started on a project on your own without knowing what the others are thinking, so I'm hoping that we can really get some good information out of the next meeting. I should have some more music by then and hopefully some light renderings (if I can find the motivation after work some night) after I get a rough sketch from our scenic designer. Other than that, I think things are moving along nicely and most of what we need for this point in the process has been figured out. I might just crack down on each director's scenes for the next few nights and come up with ideas for each one, then call each director and ask them to listen to a few clips. That way I can talk directly to them and see if I'm anywhere near what they are thinking and make sure that there is a cohesive whole for the design process. Again, this depends entirely on my summer motivation and how much energy I have left at the end of the day.

I had a great weekend and got to see Denise, Matt, Dan (and his brother and sister-in-law!), Noah, and much of my family. I'm back here at my aunt's getting ready for tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I should get to bed so I can get up bright and early for work. I'll try to get on again tomorrow night with any exciting new things that I know. In the meantime, remember that if words begin to fail when coming out of the mouth on your face, just know that you with the words, suck too.