Hey folks,

Great. Just as I have a billion things to do as director/editor/post-production supervisor on this movie, those GMD Studios folks out of Florida tell me they need a production diary for this website. You'd think they'd be too busy screwing up elections and disenfranchising old Jewish ladies out there to bother asking me for a diary, but I guess not. So now I have to tear myself away from CNN, I mean, working on the movie, to become a content provider for them.

I always thought that websites were something you slapped together after the film was done (who goes to film websites? they're so damn boring!), but my fine collaborators at GMD claim this website is going to be a cut above the usual, and, being an optimist, I believe them. So here's the diary. It's not going to be one of those kinds of diaries that says things like, "I wonder if I should tell M. that I like her? No, she only has eyes for C." That's for my private diary (don't tell M.). Rather, this diary will be a series of tedious, self-absorbed entries about the surprisingly workaday world of a doc filmmaker. Oops, I mean...an exclusive view inside the glamorous world of the movies!

Logging footage! Digitizing footage! Conforming multiple tracks into nested sequences! Even...running Norton Utilities! Three times a day!

Okay, enough with the sarcasm (how can you blame me? like the rest of the nation I'm suffering "the psychic pain of uncertainty"), at least for a paragraph or two. Let me bring you up to speed on this whole MacArthur Park thing. The movie, a feature-length documentary, began shooting in February of this year soon after I met David James and Debra Meagher, two L.A. residents who had formed a grass-roots group designed to force an independent commission to be formed to look into the Gates assassination. Like a lot of people, I was intitially obsessed with the assassination but soon moved on once it became apparent that the police had caught the killer and that he had done the deed alone. But Debra and David turned me on to a lot of overlooked information, and soon I was wondering if maybe there weren't some questions that still needed to be answered about what happened on December 2, 1999.

Since February I've shot over 60 hours of interviews, Citizens for Truth meetings and various demonstrations conducted by the group, which has evolved into a research and investigative entity of its own. I have also become a bit of a Gates assassination researcher myself. While I haven't, I hope, become infected by TB ("True Believerism"), I do think that the questions CfT raises in its work deserve attention, and the documentary is largely focused on those questions--it takes no stand for or against the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination but does bring to light issues that I think have been neglected by the mainstream media. The movie will ultimately use the story of a year in the life of CfT to explore the various controversies related to the Gates killing.

And that pretty much brings us up to speed. Even though I'm still shooting, I've also been sequestering myself in the editing room quite a bit recently, getting the massive amount of raw footage I've already shot into shape. As just about everyone who shoots in the DV format has remarked during post-production, you end up shooting a lot more than you do with film, just because the raw stock is so cheap ($40 per 3 hours, in the case of Sony DVCAM tapes--a fraction of the cost of film that is almost as tiny as George W. Bush's margin of "victory" in Florida, and much smaller than his blood alcohol content after his arrest as a "youth"). There are also roughly 2500 pages of transcripts, so just getting to know the footage takes many hours of each editing day.

Forensic animation artist George Kelly has been turning in early drafts of the 3D animation for the film that are truly stunning, and working with George has happily been taking up a lot of my post-production time as well. Why 3D animation? After hearing various researchers into the Gates assassination speculate about what might have happened inside the Park Plaza Hotel after Gates was shot, it hit me--almost nobody really knows what went on in there. So, taking its cue from Kurosawa's "Rashomon," "MacArthur Park" will use 3D animation to play one possibility after another. I'm doing my best to remain impartial (an elusive concept, to be sure) and to make this "Rashomon" segment as complete as I can.

Some JPEGs below will give you an idea of how George and I communicate.

And I've done just about as much prattling on about myself as I care to for the moment. CNN beckons. So, good-bye, take care, and write soon.

Best,
Brian Flemming
doc@nothingsostrange.com

George creates the animation in a program called Maya. He uses
pictures to create wireframe models of the real structures.

George sent me a picture of the models we'll be using to represent Hidell, Baker and Powell in the animations. I opened the image in Photoshop, made some adjustments to the look, and snapped a screenshot of those changes being made, so that George would know what I did. Almost totally nonverbal communication--which is good, because George talks a lot and I don't have a lot of time.

Similar nonverbal adjustment. Sometimes I'm so grateful to Al Gore for having invented the Internet, because this kind of thing would be a lot harder over the telephone ("Take down the saturation a bit, but not too much, know what I mean?").

The secret is out. I love to steal. In this case, we're stealing our color pallette from David Fincher's movie "Seven." I snagged some pics from the web and slapped together this graphic to show George how I wanted the color scheme for the inside of the hotel to look. I'd credit the DP and production designer, but I'm too lazy to look them up. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery anyway.