delta phi edit

spend the last week of my life making red envelopes one frame at a time.

I still don't regret shooting in thirty frames per second

going to wear a wrist brace and export the film today :)

Delta Phi as Litmus Test

How can I describe my relationship to Delta Phi right now? It feels like the heaviest and lightest project I’ve done at once.

On the one hand, I’m a novelist, used to spending a year or far longer on a single story. Used to living with the same characters for decades. Long enough to have conclusive concepts behind the work. Long enough to make a story that is unified and feels resolved, like a conclusion about something that also brings up more questions.

Delta Phi feels a bit different. Although I developed the premise for years, the script was written in a few short months. It felt like a collection of ideas; it was chronological and teleological, but played host to many concepts. The script needed the production to pull the concepts together. The production itself was a litmus test to determine the strongest and weakest aspects of the script. Delta Phi, from the beginning, was in every sense an experiment. I want to learn as much from it as possible, and I wanted room for mistakes.

It was meant to be that way for the team, too. I wanted them to get as much from the project as possible. If I instead shot some adaptation of an older work, it would be too resolved. It would be more about my vision than about learning, particularly since the resources and team were mostly familiar to each other. It was working with a method, a setting, and people that have all worked together before, so the growth had to be in the story.

It some sense, Delta Phi is also a litmus test for my future in metafiction. I’m trying to see what I can make of this; trying to find out whether I can make this work for others as well as it works for me in my own mind.

I’m putting on the final touches of the edit this week, and after that I’ll finally have the opportunity to show the finished product to some family and friends. It makes me terribly nervous. Writing a novel doesn’t garner nearly as much attention. I suppose it is easier to write a bad book than to make a bad film. Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.

So yeah, I’m nervous. Sharing takes just as much practice as making.

On Passion

I still get excited about the sheer awoken-ness of characters sometimes. About the mystery of them. While editing scene 2 of Delta Phi I got to see the strength of a cinematographers instinct in a new environment, and the oscillation of disguise/reveal of Delta as he moves through a library. I knew it would be there in theory, it’s written into the script. But seeing something concretely is a huge part of the magic for me. It causes something in me to wake up, to stir a little, to just feel wonder and bewilderment. It’s like the discovery of a strange and exotic new animal. I’m absolutely in love.

This website is, in part, academic. It has to be if I want to share the meaning of metafiction, but I have to write to the beat of my passion. Passion feels like acting on impulse but with extreme slowness. It’s this deep compassion for every aspect of your unique, individual experience, to the point that your experience expands and it’s so much about what’s in you that it’s not about you at all anymore. Passion is so easily misunderstood. It so often controls us instead of the other way around.

I’m pondering this because I need to tap into it over the next several weeks. I need to be unequivocally committed to this work right now, to embrace an entirely different lifestyle if I’m to meet my deadlines, and more importantly, my potential. I didn’t necessarily want that for this season of my life. I wanted something more nurturing, romantic and restful. But we don’t always get to choose what season we are in, and fighting it detracts from your experience. Anyway, it’s a great place to be, to be working like this. I only hope that I can have many, many more seasons like this because there’s so much work I want to share, not to mention generate.
I never could explain the immense love I have for the imagined friends of our hearts, and with film, I may not have to. I’m in a place where my love makes sense. I have to fight to keep a place for it because it’s how I have to share my light. We all have something great to offer, but we have to find the place where it’s wanted and work tirelessly to keep that place.