Summer of Bleh

I can hardly believe it, but my summer is nearly over and it's back to teaching next week. I wish I could say I got a lot of writing done, but not so much. Hell, I didn't even get any reading done (I'm only half way through George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream, which I started back in June!). The summer was marred with the mundane and exhausting task of scraping together enough work to make ends meet. A lucrative ghost writing job fell through in June, leaving me scrambling, and eventually I ended up teaching local summer camps for kids and picking up a lot of random labor jobs from Craigslist. The summer camps were oftentimes fun, but I definitely learned I don't have the patience to work with little kids every day. I'll stick with high school and college age students, thank you very much. The summer was hardly a waste, though. I did a lot of work with my band, Wheel House, both gigging and getting into the studio to record our first EP, plus, the summer camps had some really cool aspects.


One of the camps I taught was a Star Wars camp, and it gave me a good excuse to go back and re-watch all the movies (the originals are still better, hands down, and I'd like to send a personal "screw you!" to George Lucas for making changes and adding a bunch of horseshit scenes to the original movies). Beyond that, I got to hone my light saber skills fighting off a bunch of 6-12 year olds, which is always a good thing.

The other camp I taught was a green screen film camp. I've had minor involvement with films in the past, primarily as a screen writer, of course, but doing this camp really forced me to learn more of the production aspects, and particularly film editing. I found editing to be time consuming and inexplicably difficult, but at the same time, I really enjoyed it. In a way, film editing exercises similar story telling skills that writing does, and it really forced me to focus on pacing, flow, and cutting, cutting, cutting. Here's a couple of videos I put together in my sparse spare time. The first is a an episode of Ahi Kerp's Man Vs Tofood, in which I cook!  This is something we filmed more than a year ago, and the footage has just been collecting dust all this time. There was something like three hours of footage and my first cut was nearly 40 minutes. It took a lot of work to get it down to a reasonable 10 minutes.

The second is a montage of my band's time in the studio. Same deal here--tons of footage and lots of killing my darlings.

That's all for now. I'll try to post more frequently this fall, hopefully with some good news about Dreamwielder and the short stories I wrote back in the spring.

-Garrett