Well, ladies and gen­tle­men, it’s been a month away from Minneapolis and school and I am feel­ing refreshed, if a lit­tle reluc­tant to head back. I am right now sit­ting in seat 13F of United flight 364 non­stop to Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport (MSP). I am watch­ing the sun set out my win­dow, over an infi­nite sea of snow clouds.

When asked what I accom­plished in the past 30 days, I can proudly respond, “Virtually noth­ing.” I have always wor­ried that I am inca­pable of tak­ing time off, and that if I never take any time off I’ll burn out and stop being able to think cre­atively. But this month I took my sweet time in doing things and was mostly able to stop think­ing about deliv­ery dates and pro­duc­tion schedules.

This is my kind of flight. Right before we took off, a flight atten­dant announced that we’d be get­ting into Minneapolis “around 6:15, or some­thing like that.” Now the pilot is read­ing off foot­ball scores. Not that I fol­low foot­ball, but it’s the thought that counts.

Of course, for accom­plish­ing vir­tu­ally noth­ing, I (or should I say WE) got quite a lot of things done. For one, you can now buy an ele­gant Terminal Philosophy mouse pad for way more than it’s worth. Faithful reader Paul sent me these pic­tures to prove that it does, as adver­tised, pro­vide cush­ion­ing for mice, but not the cute furry ones:

But that’s a tri­fle com­pared to what else has been going on. I sent off the Wholesale Souls, Inc. DVD for mas­ter­ing, which means that you will finally be able to pur­chase your very own copy of the film, com­plete with a spe­cial fea­tures disc that includes, among other things, a making-of doc­u­men­tary and a lot of footage of Mr. Darren Marshall mak­ing a fool of him­self in the Channel 10 stu­dio. (I was plan­ning to have the DVD avail­able by the first week of January, but what with fac­tors out of my con­trol includ­ing a gigan­tic bliz­zard that shut down the state of Colorado for sev­eral days and the appar­ent inun­da­tion of CustomFlix with new orders, this has to be delayed. I am still wait­ing for the proof DVD, which will have to be for­warded to me in Minneapolis for inspec­tion before I can approve pro­duc­tion. THEN it will be avail­able, and believe me, you’ll all know.)

As far as Terminal Philosophy goes, we got most (but not all) of the pick­ups we needed, and a fair deal of ADR. The good news is that Parker got a shot­gun mic for Chrismas and should be able to record ADR in Colorado and then upload it for me to inte­grate in the mas­ter time­line that I am work­ing on in Minnesota. Ain’t tech­nol­ogy grand?

The major pickup we got was an entire miss­ing scene. Every pro­duc­tion has a cursed scene. In Wholesale Souls it was Scene 13, a moniker which still strikes fear into the hearts of those who worked on the film. In Terminal Philosophy, it was the scene In Which Leo Meets the Grim Reaper. I’ll be post­ing a thor­ough arti­cle on that scene and all the prob­lems we had in a day or two, but for now suf­fice it to say that the scene is in the can, that in the scene I make my “real” act­ing debut, and that despite all my nerves and all the dif­fi­culty we went through, I am quite ecsta­t­i­cally pleased with the footage we got.

Now the big news: The first cut of Terminal Philosophy is almost done. That’s right, we have (with a few minor holes) every­thing up from the begin­ning of the movie through Leo’s entrance into Hell edited and pieced together. Of course, now I’m going to be busy with school (includ­ing my first ever real film class), so progress will slow dra­mat­i­cally in the ensu­ing months.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on with me.