Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Dub-C
On Friday Mo and I drove to West Chester, Pa a suburban town outside of Philadelphia. The oh-so-famous Bam Margera is from West Chester. We were headed there to see Tim and Pearl Jam. Dave, Mo's brother in-law also came along for the trip. We had tickets to see Pearl Jam that night.
Mo is going to fill you in on Friday's events...
Saturday June 20th
I woke up around 8:30 to see Mo and Dave off. It was very hard to get out of bed after standing all evening at the concert. Dave had to work at 4 that day and they had a 5 hour drive ahead of them. Mo,Dave, Tim, Tim's Mom and I stood in the kitchen for a little and chatted as they prepared for their drive and rehydrate. Tim's family has an 11 week old caca-poo puppy, so obviously we talked about all our dog's for a while. Mo and Dave hit the road. Tim and I went to breakfast with his parents. After breakfast we went home and brainstormed about our plans for the weekend. We decided to go to the Philadelphia Outlets that had recently opened. Tim's mom had been wanting to go for awhile. So after about 20 minutes of driving we arrived in discount shopping paradise. Our first stop was coach. As we walked in we were greeted by signs displaying SALE. 20% - 50% off already reduced prices! Tim's mom and I were very excited and Tim quickly panicked. Luckily across the way was a Sony outlet. After having to make many decisions, I chose 2 perfect bags. Tim called, he needed help picking out a TV. The salesman at the Sony store was very confusing and kinda annoying. Eventually Tim picked out a TV. I was going to help him pay for it for his Birthday but the store tried to charge the whole TV to me, which sent PNC into some security threat to my card. PNC put a hold on my card and called my home in Pittsburgh and cell to alert a security threat. Tim ended up paying for the TV himself and I started to worry someone hacked into my account. I called PNC and they said everything was fine. We decided to leave immediately before any of us spent anymore money. We pulled up to Sony's back door and realized the TV would not fit into the back of their SUV with me in the back. I sat on Tim's lap and we headed home. We ordered some Italian food for dinner and watch the Jack Black movie "Be Kind Rewind"... I fell asleep.
Mo is going to fill you in on Friday's events...
Saturday June 20th
I woke up around 8:30 to see Mo and Dave off. It was very hard to get out of bed after standing all evening at the concert. Dave had to work at 4 that day and they had a 5 hour drive ahead of them. Mo,Dave, Tim, Tim's Mom and I stood in the kitchen for a little and chatted as they prepared for their drive and rehydrate. Tim's family has an 11 week old caca-poo puppy, so obviously we talked about all our dog's for a while. Mo and Dave hit the road. Tim and I went to breakfast with his parents. After breakfast we went home and brainstormed about our plans for the weekend. We decided to go to the Philadelphia Outlets that had recently opened. Tim's mom had been wanting to go for awhile. So after about 20 minutes of driving we arrived in discount shopping paradise. Our first stop was coach. As we walked in we were greeted by signs displaying SALE. 20% - 50% off already reduced prices! Tim's mom and I were very excited and Tim quickly panicked. Luckily across the way was a Sony outlet. After having to make many decisions, I chose 2 perfect bags. Tim called, he needed help picking out a TV. The salesman at the Sony store was very confusing and kinda annoying. Eventually Tim picked out a TV. I was going to help him pay for it for his Birthday but the store tried to charge the whole TV to me, which sent PNC into some security threat to my card. PNC put a hold on my card and called my home in Pittsburgh and cell to alert a security threat. Tim ended up paying for the TV himself and I started to worry someone hacked into my account. I called PNC and they said everything was fine. We decided to leave immediately before any of us spent anymore money. We pulled up to Sony's back door and realized the TV would not fit into the back of their SUV with me in the back. I sat on Tim's lap and we headed home. We ordered some Italian food for dinner and watch the Jack Black movie "Be Kind Rewind"... I fell asleep.
Pearl Jam
Shira and I took off work Friday to go to a Pearl Jam Concert in Camden NJ. We hit the rd with my brother in law, david, @ 10:30. We were supposed to leave at 10 but David is always a half hour late to everything. Lacey Suggested telling him we were leaving at 9:30 to compensate but I didn't listen. We arrived at Shira's boyfriends house at 3:30 in westchester, and left for the concert right away. We picked up sandwiches and drinks and then hit traffic, which tacked on an extra hour and a half to the ride . I was not counting on the traffic and foolishly chugged a large Gatorade. The result wasn't favorable. We finally got to Camden which is not one of the safest places to be. Aaron, from the Next Food Network Star, is from Camden and I think he has a good chance at winning the competition. I think Lisa might have a slight lead on him. This is my favorite show at the moment. Bobby Flay is awesome. Anyway, the tailgating at this event was amazing. The parking lots were full of thousands of people partying. There were a lot of home-made games every where. Things like toss something into a hole or in a bucket....they looked like fun actually. I have never seen anything like that in Pittsburgh. The concert was very good. I think musicians like Eddie Vedder are a dying breed. He cares .....which shows in his performance. The night was tainted by a couple of bozo's who resorted to violence and basically acted like pricks. If you can't get along at a concert, you shouldn't be allowed in public. It is frustrating seeing something like that when music is sending the opposite message....I mean, why are you here? The rest of the weekend I worked on cleaning my backyard and also worked on an oil painting. I'll post a picture when it is done. This week is very exciting because the Yankees are in Pittsburgh and my friend Scott is in town and I have not seen Scott in a whole year and the Yankees have not been here in 38yrs! BDI is coming Sunday and there will be plenty of work after my Pittsburgh vacation. We also have a Mocap demo coming up for some high school kids. Anyone have suggestion on what we should wear? Maybe elbow pads and helmets again?
I'm Finally Blogging!
Okay, here I go... This past week (Wednesday thru Sunday) I went to Miami for my sorority's national convention. It was fun because my friend, Christie, went with me and we stayed on a really nice resort. Other than that, the convention was just what I expected, lots of women in a room- talking a lot. The resort had a really nice pool and a great jogging trail though (which is nice because I am trying to run 5 miles a day over the summer.) On the way home, the airline lost my bags so I didn't get them until yesterday afternoon when they were dropped off at my apartment. My parents picked me up from the airport and we went to Mad Mex, which is consistently delicious. I got a tofu quesadilla and a mango margarita. I proceeded to sleep the rest of my Sunday off. Yesterday, I came to work late because I had to wait for my bags to be delivered to the apartment. While I was waiting, I ran around the block a few times to get my exercise, and I found a lost dog that was about to run out on 5th Avenue. I picked her up and carried her to all the surrounding apartment buildings and knocked on people's doors, until a disheveled woman claimed that it was her dog. It made me sad because she didn't seem worried about her or happy that she was back. I kind of wish that I could have kept it because it was smaller than my cats, so I think they would have gotten along. When the delivery man dropped off my bags around 2:30 pm , he told me I was lovely which creeped me out and I made sure he quickly left my apartment building. After working, I went to a Washington Wild Things (minor league baseball) game in Washington, PA (near my parents house.) My dad's company owns the field so we sat in the owners box and had delicious food and alcohol for free. After the game, Clay and I got ice cream and fell asleep watching Law and Order. Sorry that this post isn't longer, I have a bad memory so I can't really remember the details of everyday.
The Past Week
Hello,
I am Ben Reicher. To pretty much sum up what I have done in the past week, click here>
http://www.reicher.com/cm1scene7.html
I am Ben Reicher. To pretty much sum up what I have done in the past week, click here>
http://www.reicher.com/cm1scene7.html
Erie Weekend
The little girl Kristen takes care of was on vacation in Florida, so she had the whole weekend off, probably only time this summer, so we decided to do a nice little weekend road trip. I skipped Lunch Friday, left work early and got home around 3:30. Of course Im a last minute packer so had nothing ready, so I open my closet grab grab items from shelf 1 some from shelf 2 dig and grab a few things from drawer 1 and 2, grab a good pair and an old pair of tennis shoes and Bam, all packed in 5 minutes. A few minutes later Kristen is done after what seemed like forever. We loaded up the car and away we went.
Like any good road trip up 79 we had to stop at the Grove City outlets, (the plan was just for dinner). I hit 2 stores, Oakley and Timberland and magically doubled my weekend wardrobe. We went in a few kitchen supply stores, some novelty stores and of course had to stop in the Coach store which had to be the smallest most crowded area of the ENTIRE outlets. After all the walking around we were hungry enough to go to the foodcourt and get dinner, Charley's Steakery. mmmmm. We then hit the road again with about an hour and a half to.
We type in the hotel we are staying at into the GPS on our new phones and immediately tells us we are not on a road. Im thinking the thing must be broke cause 79 is a major road, and then it reconnects to the system and all of a sudden we are found again and on a road. After working our way through the city of Erie, we Found our hotel.
We made reservations for this hotel Knights Inn through some Trip Rewards thing that Kristen has. Pictures make everything look so much better. First it used to be a Super 8, and there was just a little 3' x5' canvas sign hung up saying it was the Knights Inn, if we didnt have GPS we wouldnt have found it. We go check in and there were these 2 young guys at the desk. One thing we wanted to do was go to some wineries this weekend so we ask where are some good ones. They respond that they have no idea what a winery is, so we descirbe it to them, place you make wine, then they understand and procede to tell us there is a pizza shop that they think sells wine around the corner. By this time I am trying not to laugh because they were just not understanding what we were trying to ask for, and the other guy go gets his laptop and gives us the name and address of the most expensive restaurant in Erie saying they should have wine, we decided to just look in the phone book. The guys also told us there was a huge car cruise thing going on down on State street, 2 blocks away. After getting the car unloaded we decided to go down and check it out, Im assuming we must have missed it or something because there were maybe 2 older corvettes and a few '50s cars, nothing I would call a huge car cruise/show. We decided to go back to the hotel and call it a night.
We get woken up at 5:30 in the am by some brat little kid bouncing his soccerball outside our door. After several failed attempts and falling back asleep we decide to get up at 7:00 and go get the continental breakfast, you know cold coffee, warm milk, stale danish and bagels with broken toaster. We got back to the room wrote down the names and addresses of wineries and headed to the beach. It was freezing at the beach and the water was really cold. Of course I had to see how far I could get in the water without getting my clothes wet, just as I thought it was a foot closer to shore than I was. Big wave came and got the middle 2 inches of my shorts soaked, I had them cuffed up so I could go in farther. We took some pictures then walked down to the next beach are to see the lighthouse and took more pictures, then it started to rainso we got back to the car and headed to do some wine tasting.
I forget the names of the places we went too but got a bottle of wine from each. The first one we went into gave tours of the winery, not what I expected at all. I guess they could be considered micro-wineries. They had like 20 1000 gallon distilling tanks, a press and a botteling machine. It wasnt fall so no grapes so nothing was running or working. it was still an informative tour that lasted about 15-20 minutes. They had 5 barrels aging, I was expecting rows and stacks of barrels like on tours you see on tv. After the tour we tried a few fines, bought one and were on our way to the next.
We were looking for an ice wine. Its a rarer type of wine that cant be produced every year. The key is to leave the grapes on the vines until the first frost, hopefully the frost comes early enough before the grapes rot on the vines. The grapes then have to be picked and squeezed while still frosted which is supposed to make a much sweeter fruitier wine that is supposed to be excellant. The second place we went to had it, but you couldnt taste it so we bought a bottle. They had a bunch of other fruit wines like peach, apple, rasberry, cherry all kinds. We went to a few more places and tried a few more wines before heading to the Smugglers Wharf for an early dinner.
We then went to the Tom Ridge Center, to watch a movie called Mysteries of the Great Lakes. Sounds like it could be a real interesting show, maybe stuff on shipwrecks, and some other cool things, we were wrong. It was a show on how they aree trying to reintroduce lake sturgeon to different areas of the great lakes that no longer have sturgeon population due to overfishing and consumption of caviar. Though interesting was completely not expected from a title such as MYSTERIES OF THE GREAT LAKES.
Sunday we went to the lake Erie Maritime Museum which was cool. They had a replica side of a ship showing the damage from real canon fire and all kinds of other neat artifacts from the battle of lake Erie of the war of 1812. We then grabbed Arby's for a late lunch and headed on home.
Like any good road trip up 79 we had to stop at the Grove City outlets, (the plan was just for dinner). I hit 2 stores, Oakley and Timberland and magically doubled my weekend wardrobe. We went in a few kitchen supply stores, some novelty stores and of course had to stop in the Coach store which had to be the smallest most crowded area of the ENTIRE outlets. After all the walking around we were hungry enough to go to the foodcourt and get dinner, Charley's Steakery. mmmmm. We then hit the road again with about an hour and a half to.
We type in the hotel we are staying at into the GPS on our new phones and immediately tells us we are not on a road. Im thinking the thing must be broke cause 79 is a major road, and then it reconnects to the system and all of a sudden we are found again and on a road. After working our way through the city of Erie, we Found our hotel.
We made reservations for this hotel Knights Inn through some Trip Rewards thing that Kristen has. Pictures make everything look so much better. First it used to be a Super 8, and there was just a little 3' x5' canvas sign hung up saying it was the Knights Inn, if we didnt have GPS we wouldnt have found it. We go check in and there were these 2 young guys at the desk. One thing we wanted to do was go to some wineries this weekend so we ask where are some good ones. They respond that they have no idea what a winery is, so we descirbe it to them, place you make wine, then they understand and procede to tell us there is a pizza shop that they think sells wine around the corner. By this time I am trying not to laugh because they were just not understanding what we were trying to ask for, and the other guy go gets his laptop and gives us the name and address of the most expensive restaurant in Erie saying they should have wine, we decided to just look in the phone book. The guys also told us there was a huge car cruise thing going on down on State street, 2 blocks away. After getting the car unloaded we decided to go down and check it out, Im assuming we must have missed it or something because there were maybe 2 older corvettes and a few '50s cars, nothing I would call a huge car cruise/show. We decided to go back to the hotel and call it a night.
We get woken up at 5:30 in the am by some brat little kid bouncing his soccerball outside our door. After several failed attempts and falling back asleep we decide to get up at 7:00 and go get the continental breakfast, you know cold coffee, warm milk, stale danish and bagels with broken toaster. We got back to the room wrote down the names and addresses of wineries and headed to the beach. It was freezing at the beach and the water was really cold. Of course I had to see how far I could get in the water without getting my clothes wet, just as I thought it was a foot closer to shore than I was. Big wave came and got the middle 2 inches of my shorts soaked, I had them cuffed up so I could go in farther. We took some pictures then walked down to the next beach are to see the lighthouse and took more pictures, then it started to rainso we got back to the car and headed to do some wine tasting.
I forget the names of the places we went too but got a bottle of wine from each. The first one we went into gave tours of the winery, not what I expected at all. I guess they could be considered micro-wineries. They had like 20 1000 gallon distilling tanks, a press and a botteling machine. It wasnt fall so no grapes so nothing was running or working. it was still an informative tour that lasted about 15-20 minutes. They had 5 barrels aging, I was expecting rows and stacks of barrels like on tours you see on tv. After the tour we tried a few fines, bought one and were on our way to the next.
We were looking for an ice wine. Its a rarer type of wine that cant be produced every year. The key is to leave the grapes on the vines until the first frost, hopefully the frost comes early enough before the grapes rot on the vines. The grapes then have to be picked and squeezed while still frosted which is supposed to make a much sweeter fruitier wine that is supposed to be excellant. The second place we went to had it, but you couldnt taste it so we bought a bottle. They had a bunch of other fruit wines like peach, apple, rasberry, cherry all kinds. We went to a few more places and tried a few more wines before heading to the Smugglers Wharf for an early dinner.
We then went to the Tom Ridge Center, to watch a movie called Mysteries of the Great Lakes. Sounds like it could be a real interesting show, maybe stuff on shipwrecks, and some other cool things, we were wrong. It was a show on how they aree trying to reintroduce lake sturgeon to different areas of the great lakes that no longer have sturgeon population due to overfishing and consumption of caviar. Though interesting was completely not expected from a title such as MYSTERIES OF THE GREAT LAKES.
Sunday we went to the lake Erie Maritime Museum which was cool. They had a replica side of a ship showing the damage from real canon fire and all kinds of other neat artifacts from the battle of lake Erie of the war of 1812. We then grabbed Arby's for a late lunch and headed on home.
Monday, June 23, 2008
My Life as a Movie
Friday June 20th
After getting back from work last night I went to Eddie and Donny's room to watch a movie with them and Robert. I fell asleep instantly on Eddie's bed again. I woke up around 2:30AM and realized that I should head to bed. So I went down stairs to Lucius' room where I was spending the night.
This morning Lucius woke up at 10 to get ready for work. I had plans to go to lunch with this guy, Jonathan, at noon,but I went back to sleep regardless. I woke up to his phone call. I told him I wasn't quite ready and would meet him at 1 as I quickly showered and got dressed. At 1 Jonathan and I went to get some sushi from this small little hole in the wall that isn't visible unless you are standing right in front of it, but you can get a platter of about 30 some sushi for 18 dollars. We then took our food back to the Columbia campus and ate on the steps. It was a really nice day out and there were quite a few of our other friends outside as well. After we demolished the sushi we went inside to get cool and get something to drink. We talked for a while, Jonathan is the kind of guy who is kind of arrogant and may not always have the best intentions, but he is someone that I work with on student council so I keep him close like a frienemy.
After we parted ways I went back to the dorms. I called for Donny to come sign me in and as I was waiting I handed the security gaurd my Columbia ID. He happened to bring the card down to the scanner which then registered the chip in my card and brought up my information on the computer screen. I also happened to be standing at an angle where I could see the screen and I noticed that there was a green bar under my name that said "access accepted", rather then the red bar that says "access denied". This meant that I actually had swipe access into the dorm. Seeing this I asked the gaurd about it. He was very confused and hesitant about letting me in. I told him that my card had simply gotten deactivated and I hadn't realized they reactivated it yet. He let me through and I met Donny in the elevator. This is a break through for me because it means I don't need someone to sign me in every time I want to go in and out of the building, which also means that I wont have to be signed in more then five days in any consecutive 30 days, which is actually a rule that I have just been ignoring.
I then went downtown to return some clothes and do some more shopping. I ended up spending a good portion of the day downtown, yet only bought one cute skirt from Macys. I headed back uptown around 8 when I got a call from Lucius saying he was bored and didn't know where anyone was. When I got back Lucius and I decided to go out to dinner. I wanted to take him some place nice to treat him for letting me stay with him for a past couple of nights. We didn't decide on a location until around 9:30 when we headed over to a steakhouse on the east side.
We ate at a place called BLT steakhouse. They give you bread and spread and popovers as complimentary appetizers and you order your steak completely separately from any sides or even sauces. I ordered this California steak that apparently the cow was only fed organic substances, with the pepercorn sauce, some mashed potatoes and some wine for the two of us. Lucius told me about this amazing day he had yesterday where he met some baseball team from Canada and he showed them all around new york, as they treated him to all the different tourist attractions such as the empire state building and riding in a rickshaw. The day ended with them finding some random limo to take them back to their hotel and giving my friend a ride back up to Columbia. We ended the dinner with some complimentary chocolate chip cookies, which I don't believe how they describe they make them because they were not cooked around the edges, and closed out the restaurant around 12:30.
We then walked around the upper east side looking for a dessert place called Serendipity, but gave up around 1 and got back on the subway to come home. We didn't get back to campus until close to 2:30 and we talked for a while longer until we fell asleep.
Saturday June 21st
I woke up around 11 in Lucius' room and went down to P's room to shower and get dressed. P went home for the weekend, and since I had a key to his room made it was like I had my own place for once. I got dressed in a fun summer dress and went down to B and C's apartment. We had plans to go to Conney Island and see the mermaid parade, and then back to times square for a city wide bubble battle. However, when I got to their apartment at 1 I was informed that they had entered a 72 movie shootout last night and had to make a movie pronto. There were a couple of other people there, T, who is their female roommate, David, who is a friend of C's, Ness, who is a girl from France and a friend of B's and is staying with them for a week, and Alvin. Alvin is a volunteer for the Asian American International Film Festival and was instructed to follow around one of the groups and keep a blog of the film making experience. C of course was the first to approach him at the launch party, and offered to put him up in their apartment for the weekend. If you would like to read his blog about the weekend you can find it at:
http://www.72hourfilmshootout.com/
The first thing we did was sit around and think of a plot for our movie. The theme was "a first goodbye" and as of last night all they had done was gotten wasted and drew penises on their idea sheet of paper. We finally came up with the idea of a call center for coffee that tasted horrible. People would call in and complain to one particular guy and keep hanging up on him. Then finally to use the resources we had Ness would call and talk to the guy in french. As he struggled to translate using google they would have a flirty conversation ending in the guy finally saying goodbye for the first time today, and the girl looking up the word for goodbye in a french-english dictionary and saying her first english word, and first goodbye. We then spent the next 3 hours writing out the script for our 5 minute film. I don't know how I got roped into being one of the writers seeing as english and such is not my strong suit.
By that time it was 5PM and C wanted to get a particular shot on the rooftop of a friend's building at sunset. So we all walked over to his friends place and set up a dinner party on the roof. C had sent out a mass e-mail and called several people asking for extras and actors. In this scene we had about 7 people standing around at the party as T was the main character talking on the phone to the call center about the horrible coffee. We then headed down to Chinatown to try and get the early dusk lighting. We shot Ness walking out of a convenient store and to her apartment in Chinatown. (In order to be counted for one award there had to be a scene shot in Chinatown). After all our outdoor shooting we went to dinner at a shanghinese restaurant and back up to B and C's place. For the rest of the night we mainly just sat around discussing what needed to get done the next day and fine tuning the script. I also called up Bert and asked him if B and C could film in the gateway lab on Columbia campus. Bert is the undergraduate in charge of the lab and has the keys to access it. It would make for a great call center. Luckily he obliged despite the fact that I would not be on set. I also called Donny and Eddie to see if they would be extras in the film. Around 2AM I went back up town and slept in P's room because he was out of town.
Sunday June 22nd
I woke up late, 10AM, for work. I ran over to Crepes on Columbus and apologized. The shift was pretty busy, there was a good consistent flow of people. When I was finally done I bought 6 crepes and headed back down to B and C's place. The production crew at crepes and then sat around for a while longer as we waited for a coffee maker. Alvin then had to leave to head back to Boston, so from his point of view we did not really accomplish much. We shot our two last scenes and C went into his room and started editing. The rest of us watched Beatleguese and then The Professional, which is a crazy movie. I moved in and out to try and help C and not have him feel to alone as he was editing.
After getting back from work last night I went to Eddie and Donny's room to watch a movie with them and Robert. I fell asleep instantly on Eddie's bed again. I woke up around 2:30AM and realized that I should head to bed. So I went down stairs to Lucius' room where I was spending the night.
This morning Lucius woke up at 10 to get ready for work. I had plans to go to lunch with this guy, Jonathan, at noon,but I went back to sleep regardless. I woke up to his phone call. I told him I wasn't quite ready and would meet him at 1 as I quickly showered and got dressed. At 1 Jonathan and I went to get some sushi from this small little hole in the wall that isn't visible unless you are standing right in front of it, but you can get a platter of about 30 some sushi for 18 dollars. We then took our food back to the Columbia campus and ate on the steps. It was a really nice day out and there were quite a few of our other friends outside as well. After we demolished the sushi we went inside to get cool and get something to drink. We talked for a while, Jonathan is the kind of guy who is kind of arrogant and may not always have the best intentions, but he is someone that I work with on student council so I keep him close like a frienemy.
After we parted ways I went back to the dorms. I called for Donny to come sign me in and as I was waiting I handed the security gaurd my Columbia ID. He happened to bring the card down to the scanner which then registered the chip in my card and brought up my information on the computer screen. I also happened to be standing at an angle where I could see the screen and I noticed that there was a green bar under my name that said "access accepted", rather then the red bar that says "access denied". This meant that I actually had swipe access into the dorm. Seeing this I asked the gaurd about it. He was very confused and hesitant about letting me in. I told him that my card had simply gotten deactivated and I hadn't realized they reactivated it yet. He let me through and I met Donny in the elevator. This is a break through for me because it means I don't need someone to sign me in every time I want to go in and out of the building, which also means that I wont have to be signed in more then five days in any consecutive 30 days, which is actually a rule that I have just been ignoring.
I then went downtown to return some clothes and do some more shopping. I ended up spending a good portion of the day downtown, yet only bought one cute skirt from Macys. I headed back uptown around 8 when I got a call from Lucius saying he was bored and didn't know where anyone was. When I got back Lucius and I decided to go out to dinner. I wanted to take him some place nice to treat him for letting me stay with him for a past couple of nights. We didn't decide on a location until around 9:30 when we headed over to a steakhouse on the east side.
We ate at a place called BLT steakhouse. They give you bread and spread and popovers as complimentary appetizers and you order your steak completely separately from any sides or even sauces. I ordered this California steak that apparently the cow was only fed organic substances, with the pepercorn sauce, some mashed potatoes and some wine for the two of us. Lucius told me about this amazing day he had yesterday where he met some baseball team from Canada and he showed them all around new york, as they treated him to all the different tourist attractions such as the empire state building and riding in a rickshaw. The day ended with them finding some random limo to take them back to their hotel and giving my friend a ride back up to Columbia. We ended the dinner with some complimentary chocolate chip cookies, which I don't believe how they describe they make them because they were not cooked around the edges, and closed out the restaurant around 12:30.
We then walked around the upper east side looking for a dessert place called Serendipity, but gave up around 1 and got back on the subway to come home. We didn't get back to campus until close to 2:30 and we talked for a while longer until we fell asleep.
Saturday June 21st
I woke up around 11 in Lucius' room and went down to P's room to shower and get dressed. P went home for the weekend, and since I had a key to his room made it was like I had my own place for once. I got dressed in a fun summer dress and went down to B and C's apartment. We had plans to go to Conney Island and see the mermaid parade, and then back to times square for a city wide bubble battle. However, when I got to their apartment at 1 I was informed that they had entered a 72 movie shootout last night and had to make a movie pronto. There were a couple of other people there, T, who is their female roommate, David, who is a friend of C's, Ness, who is a girl from France and a friend of B's and is staying with them for a week, and Alvin. Alvin is a volunteer for the Asian American International Film Festival and was instructed to follow around one of the groups and keep a blog of the film making experience. C of course was the first to approach him at the launch party, and offered to put him up in their apartment for the weekend. If you would like to read his blog about the weekend you can find it at:
http://www.72hourfilmshootout.com/
The first thing we did was sit around and think of a plot for our movie. The theme was "a first goodbye" and as of last night all they had done was gotten wasted and drew penises on their idea sheet of paper. We finally came up with the idea of a call center for coffee that tasted horrible. People would call in and complain to one particular guy and keep hanging up on him. Then finally to use the resources we had Ness would call and talk to the guy in french. As he struggled to translate using google they would have a flirty conversation ending in the guy finally saying goodbye for the first time today, and the girl looking up the word for goodbye in a french-english dictionary and saying her first english word, and first goodbye. We then spent the next 3 hours writing out the script for our 5 minute film. I don't know how I got roped into being one of the writers seeing as english and such is not my strong suit.
By that time it was 5PM and C wanted to get a particular shot on the rooftop of a friend's building at sunset. So we all walked over to his friends place and set up a dinner party on the roof. C had sent out a mass e-mail and called several people asking for extras and actors. In this scene we had about 7 people standing around at the party as T was the main character talking on the phone to the call center about the horrible coffee. We then headed down to Chinatown to try and get the early dusk lighting. We shot Ness walking out of a convenient store and to her apartment in Chinatown. (In order to be counted for one award there had to be a scene shot in Chinatown). After all our outdoor shooting we went to dinner at a shanghinese restaurant and back up to B and C's place. For the rest of the night we mainly just sat around discussing what needed to get done the next day and fine tuning the script. I also called up Bert and asked him if B and C could film in the gateway lab on Columbia campus. Bert is the undergraduate in charge of the lab and has the keys to access it. It would make for a great call center. Luckily he obliged despite the fact that I would not be on set. I also called Donny and Eddie to see if they would be extras in the film. Around 2AM I went back up town and slept in P's room because he was out of town.
Sunday June 22nd
I woke up late, 10AM, for work. I ran over to Crepes on Columbus and apologized. The shift was pretty busy, there was a good consistent flow of people. When I was finally done I bought 6 crepes and headed back down to B and C's place. The production crew at crepes and then sat around for a while longer as we waited for a coffee maker. Alvin then had to leave to head back to Boston, so from his point of view we did not really accomplish much. We shot our two last scenes and C went into his room and started editing. The rest of us watched Beatleguese and then The Professional, which is a crazy movie. I moved in and out to try and help C and not have him feel to alone as he was editing.
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