My birthday

In the late morning I went over to Ben's house to do two pickup shots. Like a good producer, I cajoled him into it telling him that it would be offensive to my tradition, age and culture not to do what I want on my birthday. He ignored me but we shot anyway. In his driveway we did one green screen shot in which he reaches for the car handle. I used two 25 cent pieces of green cardboard from Aaron Brothers and the key pulled surprisingly well. But the sequence looks better without it, though, so I'll probably drop it. Then I needed to get a low angle of him opening the car door so we went to the nearby supermarket parking lot and shot there so we could get open blue sky. It was near noon so I was shooting directly into the sun. It made the shot look a little rough and out of focus. It was good enough so it stays. Hopefully, a CMOS won't burn out if you point it into the sun. Ben was surprised to find out that with analog cameras, they always told you not to point at the sun because it will burn out the element.

I then went home, cut the shots together and took a nap. I got my Legend of the Sacred Stone in the mail. Then I went to pick up Sean. While there I ran into David C. That was a shock. In LA, you just don't run into people. It's too much of a sprawl. But this is the second time I've run into him—the first time at Pet Smart. I found that we've both been taking our kids to the same daycare for awhile now and didn't even know it. That's the kind of daycare this is—huge and a bit faceless. David just got his Canon HV-20 that he's going to use for the final shot. I need to send him the flyer prop.

After that I took Sean to Houstons for dinner to celebrate my birthday. Houstons is a coffee shop with delusions of grandeur, the kind of place that expresses the idea of "nice restaurant" by being as dark as possible. I think it's funny the way the food servers are all dressed in black, as if they are bunraku puppeteers trying to remain invisible as they perform their duties. I actually used to go to the Houstons in Austin, Texas when I lived there. That one really was like a coffee shop, very Marie Callendar's-like.

Anyway, at Houston's I saw the waitress, my nemesis. The first time she served us was when Sean was a baby. She was friendly and very nice. At the time I guessed she was an actress since she has that generically attractive, malleable look I've seen in so many performers. Then the other year when I was there I told her she got my order wrong and she went off on a short rant. That's when I figured that her acting career never took off so she was stuck at Houstons which caused her to slide into an emotional morass, eventual weight gain and the bitterness of dreams lost. A long time ago I wrote how narratives help us structure and understand the world. I guess thinking about that waitress is an example of me writing a narrative back story, albeit a cliched one.

I had the Hawaiian ribeye which is like nothing I've had in Hawaii but apparently does appeal to Hawaiian tastes since I order it every time I go there. I then went home and finished painting the stucco wall that Jeff, Ben's brother fixed. I was thinking about color-correcting—why can I spend hours noodling around with Apple Color when I find painting the house such an unrewarding task? It occurred to me that it has to do with meaning. In Color, you're making changes that affect the interpretation of an image. Maybe using the bleach bypass filter will make this image look icier. Or maybe it will look grittier. It all depends on the context. When you're painting the house, the point is not to create something that you can interpret. It's to do a good job. It's a job a machine could do better. If houses were cars, we'd have robots spray-painting them in booths and the only thing to judge would be if it was painted well or poorly.