Day Two of a Four Day Trip

Woke up around 4:30 AM due to jet lag. Had to force myself to go back to sleep until around 6. Just got up and wrote for an hour and a half. Went over to Ben Rekhi’s spot in Santa Monica. He showed me his new short film Fallout. The short was quite decent. It looked and sounded great and he utilized a form of green screen animation similar to Sin City. The most interesting and inspiring aspect of his film was that he had outsourced all the animation to India. This is no accident as Ben has been working in India for 2 years now. But it’s a fantastic approach that really opens a lot of doors for us as a group of filmmakers. I’d love to incorporate animation into one of my future films and outsource the animation work. To that extent the short film was a great experiment, pulled off by Ben. I drove to Beverly Hills to a restaurant called Susan Feniger’s Street to meet a partner at a commercial house called Chelsea. The restaurant was amazing. All the dishes were pulled from ‘street food’ across the globe. They had this thing called Kaya Toast that was tasty. We discussed the possibility of launching my career into the commercial realm. I watch a lot of sports so I see some great ads. Specifically I think the NBA playoff ads of last year were dope, deftly mixing music and slow-mo visuals together with a perfect tagline. Anyone who’s seen my movies knows I love nothing more than slow motion and music. However they thought my talents would be better utilized in crafting stories as that seems to be something sorely lacking in the commercial world. I suppose that makes sense, ad people know how to write great taglines and come up with cool concepts but writing stories and getting viewers ‘hooked’ from one moment - waiting for the next - is something that takes the skills of a writer and someone with great experience telling feature length stories and working with film actors (aka “thespians.”) I have had some great ideas lately in the documentary storytelling realm. For example I’d love to do a film like The Carter starring someone like Usain Bolt but distribute it on the web in the form of ad-sponsored ‘mini-webisodes.’ So Puma for example would sponsor each episode with their clothing featured heavily, but what you’d be watching would be pure cinema verite art film about the life of the world’s fastest man. I pitched this idea to the partner at Chelsea - she thought it was cool and I’ll continue to use this blog to write down more ideas like this. It was a terrific meeting and I’m now psyched on the prospects of creating art in the commercial world. Is it possible? Some might scoff at that idea. But I think it’s making a whole lotta fucking sense right now.