Mom's wrist has not healed the way they wanted it to, so they're removing the plate and screws and starting over again. This is the sixth invasive surgery since we started filming. The surgery is slated for earl February, after a baby shower mom is throwing. She'll be visiting later that month for my birthday - I'm hoping to show her a rough cut.

I was recently awarded a Small Grant in the Arts by the Fleishhacker Foundation! I had applied way way back and forgotten all about it, but a check for $1,900 came in the mail yesterday. This should enable me to pay someone to do my After Effects sequences and speed up the process a bit. I have registed to graduate in May, so now there is an official deadline, which I think will be helpful in motivating me.

They put a plate along her right wrist, where the bone had been crushed, and everything seemed to go well. The amount of nerve endings in that area has made this more painful than her hip surgeries, and the fact that it is her right hand is a frustration for her, but the cast should be off in three weeks and she should be able to unwrap her own Christmas presents. I'll be home next week for the first time since May. I've scheduled an interview - need to m

It clocks in at about 35 minutes. From the looks of things, it will boil down to 26-28 pretty easily. There are parts I'm happy with and parts I'm struggling with, but on the whole it is coming together nicely. Having the fist cut com0pleted has helped tremendously with building momentum: I'm hoping these next few months will be very productive. I'll post a section of the film once I've got some sound prepared.

My sister Stefanie called me last night to tell me that mom had fallen again while making dinner, breaking her right wrist. Apparently her hip and legs are fine, but is was another frustrating setback for her - she was passionately involved in planting a new vegetable garden, had been working part-time as a literacy coach, and had regained much of her confidence. I was, ironically, editing the sequence that chronicled her last fall, and sketching out a voiceover that recounted the realizations I had then. This new information was a kind of test, in that I had a fresh emotional response to compare with my claims about my response to the previous fall. Not sure if that makes sense. I wasn't blindsided by this news, and I wasn't blindsided by the rush of emotions that I experienced (immediately wondering if she'd been drinking, for example). I like to think I had some of the calm that my parents approach these matters with, and that was encouraging.

I am very happy to announce I have been hired to run an after-school filmmaking program for the Bay Area Video Coalition in Oakland. It is a dream job: working with creative and passionate teen filmmakers, traveling with them to national youth media conferences, and operating within a supportive and vigorous non-profit organization. My hours of employment are Monday to Friday 12-7, so I'm hoping to edit in the morning. It will slow things down a bit, but I am enlisting the help of some ex-students  to work on sound and After Effects. Hopefully I will be extra motivated now that someone else is working on the post-production with me.

I've got 18 silent rough cut minutes done. This version looks to be about thirty. I'm scared to actually go back and look at what I've done - I'm just tacking one scene to the next. There has been some nice surprises regarding how shots fit together and I've made a number of productive discoveries. My biggest concern is tone: it bounces between depression, elation, anxiety, etc constantly. How do I make it all feel organic and unified, especially with so many different aesthetics? I'm just going to get to the end of this cut, then see what I've got.

I have done absolutely everything possible to put off editing, but I'm petty much backed into a corner now. My room is clean; I have done the dishes and vacuumed the house; I have started a facebook page and am jogging daily. With school over, though, I have all the time in the world to finally get going on this. Editing a documentary is an entirely different animal: there are so many choices it can be paralyzing. Today I did my opening credits, because it was manageable and basic. Tomorrow, I cut the first scene. I have three 2 foot by 3 feet foamcore sheets in front of me with frame grabs from every shot in my movie
 (an idea stolen from Walter Murch), which has been helpful for visualizing things. I also have a huge black board with all of my different scenes set up as color-coded squares that can be re-arranged. Maybe this will be helpful - mostly I did it to put off editing in earnest.

Unfortunately, I was not selected to receive funding from the Princess Grace Foundation. This was disappointing: the application was just about the best writing I've done in some time. SFSU faculty were exhaustive in helping me assemble it, and there had been a tradition of state students doing well at that stage. I'm moving on and applying for funding elsewhere.

We shot six cans of film at home over the past four days, and came away with some very exciting footage. I chose to focus on mom's therapy, on the texture of her skin and scars, and tried to get more candid moments on camera. I also composed some more stylized sequences and inserted myself more in the film. Mom did great and was a real trooper. Sinisa was here as DP and Joel came down for a couple days as our Gaffer. I'm hoping this is the last filming I'll have to do; I feel like the story of the doc has a good arc now - not to be confused with closure, but I feel like there's been a journey that I can turn into a decent 15-20 minute film.