"Dreamworld" blog

I have never written a "blog" before. I've never been interested. As a child I tried to keep a journal, but I was never good at it or had much patience for it. My childhood journal is more of a scrapbook of the movies I went to see than it it anything. My most vivid memory of journal writing was trying to do decide whether I liked or disliked "Superman III" (this was actually one of the epic internal struggles of my childhood. Disliking the sequel to "Superman II" was a staggering disappointment). I only share the details of my personal life with a select group of close aquaintances, and, as far as pithy-observations about every day life, I'd rather do that in conversations on my favorite message board (where anything I say sounds cooler and more important because it's posted by someone called "The Dark Knight"). So, I considered it rather unlikely I would ever keeping a "blog" (I still find it difficult to even use this term without quotation marks, both because I don't understand the origin and meaning of the word, and because it automatically makes me think of "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog" on the brilliant sitcom "Arrested Developement".

However, growing up, I did thoroughly enjoy reading production diaries of films I loved. Quite possibly my favorite of these was Bob Balaban's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary", because, rather than being written by a Unit Publicist, it was an actual perspective from an actor on the film. I've always wanted to have a book like that about a film I made.

This week, I got the greenlight on my short film "Dreamworld", a comic/fantasy/adventure which is a very loose retelling of the Arthur legend. This is not a major feature film. It's a stuydent/independent film. But I have extrememly high hopes for it. The budget and resources considerably surpass anything I've worked with before. The HD cameras we're working with are amazing. I love the crew I'm working with. I think this is going to LOOK like a major feature film. At least, I hope it does. So, I decided I wanted to document this experience in detail.

"Dreamworld" is, perhaps more than anything else, a nod to the sorts of films that inspired me to love movies in the first place. I'm relying heavily on the work of my hero, Steven Spielberg, as inspiration here. I always do, but this time I am really trying to catch the imaginative wonder and emotional uplift of the master. I will not make something on the level of "E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial". I'm just being realistic. That achievement will never be duplicated by anyone, no matter what their resources, and certainly not by me on what is still a rather modest budget. But this is the sort of movie "Dreamworld" aspires to. It's meant to be what Bob Balaban, in his "Close Encounters" diary, described as "a movie movie".

So, with a little trepidation, and a lot of excitement, we now set out on the adventure that lies ahead.

For Camelot!