Acting: A. Directing: C-

A real dead bird. Looks fake to me.

Ben finally made it back from San Diego and we shot the bird scene in a little over an hour. Ben did a nice job of acting. His reaction shot was great. For some reason he looks like Harrison Ford in one place. His "looking for the birds in the sky" shot also came out nicely. I give myself a C- only because my job was so tough. I had to shoot around Ben's hair plus I had to use a substitute location. Otherwise, I would have given myself a D. The shots that work, work well. But I didn't get enough coverage. It's making continuity a little difficult and it's making it hard to build as much suspense as I'd like. A huge part of the problem is that I have to cheat so much since we're using a different location. I just can't get the angles I would normally get.

While there Ben found a dead bird. He thought it was strangely coincidental since we were shooting the dead bird scene. I thought it meant that summer is here and West Nile is back. (As a good citizen I reported it to the authorities.) Ben was saying that we could probably have shot the entire desert scene in the equestrian area. I looked back over the existing desert footage and discovered that going to the desert two years ago got us one important thing—sky. The shots have nice big skies, something we just can't get in the city.

The dead crow interior shots are OK, but are too subtle. One thing I'm learning is what it means to control the "size" of a performance or design. I read an interesting interview about the movie Dark Star. The production designer was saying that he wanted to make the space ship look dirty and grundgy, but it just didn't come across on film. Then he worked on Ridley Scott's Alien and when he saw the set, the whole thing look utterly trashed, way overdone. But it came out great on film. Reminds me of the green room which was not grundgy enough so we had to make it worse. If I could go back, I'd make it even grundgier. Anyway, the dead bird shot needs to be bigger with more birds. There needs to be shattered glass everywhere, like a crazy person's room in a car—sparkling, scary, blood, birds and glass.