Scene 26

Just a quick note. I've finished up with Scene 26 edit, and tracking. I am working the basic color and the signage to be placed. Next week will be more productive I'm sure. We are currently rebuilding our harddrive space with a 4TB G-Raid for Backup and a 4TB CaldigitVr for primary. I'm hoping to tackle our Revolutioners scene next week. Lots of matching camera moves...so we'll see how well we do.
-Charles

Progress update

Well, we've had some issues since I last blogged. Hard Drive Issues to be exact. We're running 4 TB of data across 4 1TB hardisks. Nothing fancy No Raid not JBOD or anything. So about a month ago these discs started to disappear. A simple reboot fixed the issue, but things have progressively gotten worse. Now mind you I have since day one been implementing a backup strategy (maybe the slowest and most obtuse one but one nonetheless) So all the data is saved to a backup every other day or so. Anyway. long story short. 2 of these drives are now corrupt with bad MBT and one randomly corrupts folders (thankfully a check disk recovers them). I am in the process of developing a smarter and more robust solution to our Hard Drive issues so hopefully this will soon be a thing of the past. Anyway. Thats what I've been dealing with. More on this when I get those 4TBers out and give them a proper looking over. By the way They're Samsung f1's hd103uj's. If they are bad they've gone bad on me in less than a year....and its basically a 75 percent failure rate going on 100....I need to check them to be sure but its not looking good. I have two other hard drives (A velociraptor system drive) and a 1TB external Iomega and neither has had an issue to speak of. hmmm. Sorry for the tech talk.
-charles

Is This Movie Feminist?

Yes it is.
I've talked with more than a few people - friends, family, acquaintances - about the movie who have put that question to me with a skeptical tone when I happen to mention the the F word in our conversation. It always strikes me as a strange question because it seems obvious to me that this movie is feminist. I forget how problematic the word "feminist" is though. I mean, there is, to understate the issue, a stigma associated for many people.
Charlie has been reading Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, a 2000 book dealing largely with the plight of 3rd wave feminism. Today he made a suggestion, inspired by his reading, about how to approach this question.
We should simply answer that, yes, it is a feminist movie, and if they ask what feminism is, say it's what we're doing.
I like it. Uncluttered and actually about as true an answer as one could put forth.
Check out a relevant excerpt from the book HERE.

Work Continues

Man, Its been way too long since we posted here. Trisha and Charlie (me) had a whirlwind vacation right after the Sneak Peak (which went great!) Since then we've finished off four more scenes and counting. I know the biggest question I've been getting is, "When will it be done?" and my best guess is three...four months...if all goes well. I am going to set up a little scene counter on here so you guys can track my progress as I whittle these scenes down. I think it'll give everyone a good perspective of how fast I can work and I actually how much work is going into this baby (A little!)

Today I am tracking all the signage from our Conference scene. It was one of the largest groups we put together and it took quite a while to shoot. We also did dolly and tracking shots that day which always add to the time. (especially when our "flextrack" ie. industrial hose- doesn't want to cooperate.) For all you nerds out there I am tracking with Mocha AE and it works excellent. We shot all our signs as white board though and I think that mocha would much rather have color. Something to remember.

Trailer Posted Online!

The cast party was this past Friday, and we previewed 3 scenes from the movie and a trailer. The trailer is posted at vimeo.com. You can check it out below.
I'm not going to lie. We had a rather sleepless week putting together all the final details. Charlie didn't sleep overnight on Wednesday, but luckily everything was done in plenty of time, and we all got some sleep Thursday night so we could be fresh for the big shin-dig. It was really nice to see all the cast again. It was probably different for us to see them than it was for them to see us. They have been going about their lives for 9 months. We have too, but we've also been staring at images of them most days during that 9 months, so in maybe a creepy kind of way, they feel like super special friends that we've been chillin' and illin' with all year - yet they don't know about it.
Anyway, my point is that we loved talking to those crazy actors. We had a lovely time, and the clips we showed seemed to go over well. What more could we ask from this event?

Science Sex and the Ladies Trailer from Charles Borowicz on Vimeo.

Previewing Select Scenes

So our first official screening event for Science Sex and the Ladies is coming up this Friday. It's a bit exciting and scary because I've been thinking and talking and working on this movie for almost 8 years, and now the product is emerging. Now, granted this is not "the movie." This is select scenes and a trailer for the movie. However, we still have to make a good showing of it.
We’re viewing this as the movie's coming out party. Of course this is a cast party of sorts, but we figured why not hit two birds with one stone. Why not use this to kick off the marketing campaign? We invited a variety of “influential” individuals. That sounds a little silly, but what we mean is people from different “crowds” who may talk (hopefully favorably) about this to friends and colleagues. We also sent invites to all our local press contacts and to some local art and/or culture bloggers. We want to place this movie on people's radar. The point is not to get pre-event press, or even after event press. In fact they don’t even have to come (although we hope everyone will).  The point is to make it known that our movie exists, is progressing, and seems kinda intriguing. It’s like a first little tap on the shoulder. Later, as the movie progresses, we’ll be trying to specifically elicit press and/or collaborations, and when we do, at least it won’t seem like we’re coming out of left field.

A few more stills.

Well, we're hard at work getting ready for our April 16th Sneak Peak of Select Scenes from Science Sex and the Ladies at the White Rabbit in Fountain Square. Its coming along great and since we've got more screen captures now we thought we'd share some. Enjoy.-charles

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Hot Tub Time Machine, Nitpicking, and The Ol' 5-Minute Man Joke

Because I generally like John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson, because I love an f'd-up (that's right keeping it clean for the kids) comedy, and because I kinda lust after the idea of a hot tub time machine, I went to see...Hot Tub Time Machine.  Highly enjoyable. I recommend it. However, I nitpick and criticize because I love. If we don't actively critique the social information our pop-culture showers on us, then we become passive sponges that are doomed to understand ourselves, our society, and our fellow humans largely though depictions created not from reality but from profit seeking industries. They simply don't put much thought into how the depictions they create affect us as long as it created revenue for them - so we have to consider how it affects us. I am going to discuss this movie in 3 parts
1) a critique focusing mostly on my disdain for worthless, dull romantic-interest tack-ons 
2) Nitpicky, but not necessarily unimportant element of the movie that annoyed my sensibilities. 
3) As always - a discussion of the blunt and/or insinuated depiction of female sexual functioning.

The Ugly Movie...sorry I mean The Ugly Truth

I don't like to be judgmental. Oh wait, I love to be judgmental actually. That movie (The Ugly Truth) sucked. However, I won't discuss the boring script, the lack of chemistry between the characters, or that it was neither humorous nor compelling in any way. No, because of the nature of this blog, I am only discussing what the movie insinuates or bluntly says about female sexual functioning, and that part pretty much sucked too.

Katherinr Heigl  is a stuffy but successful female lead forced into a work relationship with Gerard Butler, the male lead shock jock with a penchant for misogyny. Surprise surprise, she hates him and he antagonizes her. She's ridiculously and obviously indignant about everything, and he's just so devil-may-care fun, raunchy, and wild. So it makes sense, I guess?, that she takes advice from him about how to sex herself up  (as if she's not super hot enough on her own - don't get me started on that) so she can get a date with her hot neighbor. Anyway in this process, he's telling her rules for getting a guy. He tell her to laugh at anything he says...


Him: "A fake laugh is like a fake orgasm"
Her: "a fake orgasm is good?
Him: "No, but a fake orgasm is better than no orgasm at all"
Her: "A fake orgasm is no orgasm"
Him: "Only to you. You're not the only one in the room, you know. Let's not be selfish."
Her: giggles
Him: "real or fake?"
Her: "You'll never know."

April 16th cast party at White Rabbit Cabaret

Last year we shot our first scene with Miss Samantha Borowicz on April 17th. So in a way it's fitting that our cast party is almost a year to the day of our first shoot. We originally thought it would happen in September, then February, and for a while now we've been thinking mid April. Now we actually have a date, and I'm super excited because we have a deadline and this is gonna happen. I assume the cast is excited because it's been a long time since we wrapped shooting. They're a wonderful and patient bunch though (on and off set), so they never complained (to me at least).

I'm also excited because it will be at White Rabbit Cabaret which just opened up in Fountain Square. In fact it's so new, it hasn't even had its grand opening yet - that will be coming soon. One of our fantastic dancers from the movie (dancing excellently to our opening number "Shitty Perspective"), Debra Silveus, is one of the owners of the White Rabbit Cabaret. I went to check it out and talk about the cast party this past Thursday, and I have to say that I was really impressed. It looks really nice in there. The stage is huge with great lighting. The place has great decorating touches like fantastic antique couches for your sitting pleasure. It's just really cool. I also was able to see a sneak peak of their house show this past Saturday. Debra and 3 other dancers (one, Heidi Keller Phillips, who also happens to be a cast member/dancer/choreographer in our movie) performed some sweet ass stuff. By stuff I mean dances that are contemporary with burlesque and cabaret influence (maybe that's not the exact correct description, but it's the best I can do with almost no dance background). They each had a variety of great cabaret outfits, pseudo names, and individual stage personas. Loved it. They looked great, danced great, and I had a great time. I suggest you head down there for a show on or after their grand opening.

Anyway, point being on Friday, April 16th at White Rabbit Cabaret, we're going to have a kick ass cast party where we are showing select scenes from the movie, and we can't wait. Invites are going out this week.

A couple more things I would like to discuss regarding intersex conditions

Same sex marriage is unnatural you say? Well by all means, please neatly define what a female is and what a male is and we can quickly ban these same sex abominations. But that's right - it can't be done. However easy you think it may be, it simply is not possible to make 2 categories (male and female) and then fit all people into one or the other. Normally it isn't that important to specifically categorize people as either biologically male or female but when it does come up, people can't figure out how to do it. Ask the International Olympic Committee. In the 1936 Olympics, Hermann Ratjen tried to pass himself off as a woman and that began the need to once and for all have a test to separate the males from the females (side note: Hermann Ratjen did not win against the women athletes). They tried checking the genitals. They tried testing for chromosomes (xx/female or xy/male).  Let's just say there is nothing straight forward about this process, and the medical community, at times, had to set the IOC straight about the complexity of the biology involved. Trying to ban males from marrying males and females from marrying females will be equally problematic. If we focus not on the sex of the person, but the gender (i.e. banning men from marrying men and women from marrying women), then it gets even more complicated. I think this quote from the Intersex Society of North America website says it well.
"Whether or not the medical establishment rallies to explain intersex to the U.S. courts remains to be seen. If history is any guide, as gay marriage prohibitions make their way through the courts, a scientific expert here and a medical expert there will offer up one little gene or one type of anatomical tissue that might be used as a male-female sorting mechanism. But such a sorting system simply won’t accord with what people see on the outside and feel on the inside. The fact is, every anatomical bit you think of as female (breasts, XX-chromosomes, even ovarian tissue) can be found on someone who has looked and felt like a male since birth. The opposite is also true. Think about it: if sex categories really were naturally strict, we wouldn’t see so many cosmetic surgeons offering men breast reductions and offering women facial electrolysis."
A ban on same sex marriage is unnecessary and discriminatory, but it is also biologically naive. How do we define who is a woman? Her level of of testosterone/estrogen levels? How her genital look? Her chromosomes? Whether she feels like she is a woman? That she is able to conceive and give birth? Whether she has ovaries? Whether she has a vagina? Does she have to be born with these things or can they be surgically or chemically imposed later in life? Good luck creating a legal set of rules that includes all people. I can tell you that there are people married right now that both have XY chromosomes.
It's interesting to me because I never hear these kinds of discussions when same sex marriages are being discussed. I assume that as bans are being challenged more and more cases are moving through the courts, these sort of silent issues will begin to rise to surface because eventually they just can't be ignored.
I think the larger point here is that there is a lot of crossover between what we know to be men and what we know to be women. Yes we can tell the difference, but sometimes the line isn't so clear, and I think that makes people uncomfortable - so uncomfortable that it causes fear and discrimination. Feminism, gay/bi issues, intersex issues, transgender/transsexual issues, (and of course the sexual issues in Science Sex and the Ladies) - these all suffer from people's discomfort with mixing the feminine and masculine.
Women aren't biologically equip to vote/think straight while on their periods/have jobs/be good at science/play sports/be on the front lines of combat/do whatever happens to be the thing that women aren't supposed to do at each particular time period in our history. Only men can do these things.
Men can't want to kiss/fall in love with other men/get married (women are supposed to make them do that)/want to nurture and raise children. Only women could want that.
Men need a penis and women must have a vagina that can hold a penis. Etc...Etc... Point is people find the gender-bending associated with these issues disturbing. This creates fear and discrimination, and then scared angry people try to say that this gender bending -whatever form it takes- is unnatural. However, we know that a distinct line between male and female that all people easily fit into is really the unnatural, biologically naive thing here.

Intro to Intersex

While researching our movie, I came across an issue that I had never thought too much about, but I think it is important and relevant to the subjects present in our movie. Intersex (learn more here) is a description of a person who does not fit neatly into either the category of male or of female.

Although exact data on this doesn't exist, 1 to 3% is a good estimate for how many people fit into the intersex category (although generally .1 to .2% is the number of children born where the medical community would consider that the child needs specialist medical intervention), and that is a significant number of people. The uninformed public often think of this issue in terms of  the poor strange hermaphrodites that have an ovary, a testical, and both male and female genitals.  The possibility that your child would be born that way seems to terrify people. This was most recently and prominently expressed in the movie BABY MAMA in which Tina Fey's character read about the possibility and spread her terror to both her sister and Amy Poehler's character. Just for your knowledge, the range of intersex possibilities is broad, and for instance, the "hermaphrodite" type of intersex condition is one of the rarer types.

The truth is that when you become informed, intersex conditions are not really scary.  However, it is understandable that parents find the prospect of having an intersex kid daunting. Parents often wonder how a child who is not strictly male or female could cope in our society? Until only very recently, any kind of intersex condition was "corrected" without question as soon as possible by medical professionals. For many intersex individuals, this means that at birth a decision was made by medical professionals as to which sex they should be. The surgical and/or hormonal changes are then administered to the patients, often as infants and often continuing throughout their lives. The child rarely has a say in this. Some live happily with the decisions that were made on their behalf, but some do not. Some simply wish they had gotten a say in the matter.

There's some good arguments out there that these kinds of sexual ambiguities are not that problematic - and that no medical interventions should be administered until the person can make a decision for him or herself. Take for instance the common intersex situation in which the clitoris is "abnormally" large or the penis is deemed "abnormally" small. I mean, if we come from a place that knows these smaller penises and larger clitorises are completely functional for receiving pleasure (because we do know this); and we come from a place where we know that sex can exist as a variety of different types of interactions - interactions that can be loving, hot and orgasmic as long as both parties have functioning sexual organs - no matter what those organs happen to look like. If we come from this mindset, then maybe there is no need to risk loss of penis or clitoral sensitivity just to look more like society thinks penises and clitorises should look.

We as a society believe and act as if there are two possibilities; male and female, and that anything else is simply an abnormality that should be corrected, just as we would correct a cleft palate or an improperly formed heart. I am not writing this to advocate abolishing all medical intervention for intersex individuals. I am only writing this to point out that intersex conditions are somewhat common, not as bad as they are made out to be, and the issues surrounding intersex conditions and the "correction" of them are probably a lot more complicated than most people realize.You probably know an intersex individual, and you may someday become the aunt, uncle, parent or grandparent of an intersex individual, so why not be a little informed. There is a growing community of parents, intersex individuals, and medical professionals (check them out here) that would like us to rethink how intersex individuals are viewed and treated. I would suggest to anyone that they check out the subject a little more deeply.

I came across this issue in a fabulous book called Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto Sterling. Intersex is only one aspect of this book that tells us effectively that viewing humans in one of 2 categories, male or female, is both socially impracticable and also scientifically inaccurate. If you're kind of a science nerd, you might just love this book.

Slow and Steady

This isn't the first movie we've made. It is the longest and most complicated, but certainly not the first, and I am well versed in the timing of movie production. However, I've been working on this movie pretty much my whole adult life, and at times the progress seems to move excruciatingly slow. We were literally doing rewrites on this for years. I think that if I hadn't gone through the hills and valleys many a time before, I may have lost hope a long time ago.
I was just thinking about this because we just finished what I consider to be some pretty big milestones. The SSL website is now up (good work Charlie). We're locked into a date for the cast party / trailer premiere, and our AnC New Years cards are finally created and mailed (that's right New Years cards in February - that's true AnC style). Take for instance the SSL website, I've been fretting about it for years - what it will contain, how it will look, how it should work, when we need to get it up, and now it's here. That seems to be how everything with a movie works. I always think it feels something like this...The initial thought (whatever it may be - writing, casting, editing, marketing...) makes you feel excited and hopeful. Then you go through a series of points where you feel alternately hopeless and then confident. It also alternately sucks and then is awesomely fun. Plus it often seems like it will never ever end, but then you are suddenly looking back on it, and it actually has ended.
I still go through all these feelings, but I think I can say now that I have a constant underlying confidence that if the time is put in, it will be done. I know it can be done, because we've always gotten it done. Right now we're looking back on the research part, the writing part, the production part, the website part. We're smack dab in the middle of the post production part, and we're just stepping into the meat of marketing hell. One day I'll be looking back at those too.

Kate & Allie, Swingtown, and Our Precious Time

We don't have cable anymore. Instead, we watch Hulu and Netflix through a computer hooked up to our TV. I think we watch more TV than ever now; we slowly devour the season after season of tv series that we can watch streaming instantly on Netflix. Our first was Swingtown. Only one sweet season (2008) was made to grace our TV. I'm not lying when I say that I would think of it during my workday and kind of mourn it; wishing that there were more to watch. Charlie and Barney would tell you the same thing. So much drama! So much poolside 70's fun at the pilot's house! So many unused opportunities for swinging! We did a lot of yelling at the TV. How does this relate to Science Sex and the Ladies? Well, in other circumstances surrounding a sexually themed tv series, I would critique the way that female sexual response was portrayed in the series. This was an ABC show, though, and there was actually a lot of nothing when it came to portraying the response part. All you saw, on the rare occasion, were some quaaludes passed around, some kissing in a pool and then it was the next morning. This was no HBO series here (Sex and the City, True Blood, and Six Feet Under, I love your soap opera charm, but I am more than willing to call out your unrealistic female orgasms. Hung, I'm not so fond of you and I have already called you out on this blog), so I'm not going to critique. I guess I just wanted to say how much I miss that ol' Swingtown.

Our latest obsession is Kate&Allie (1984-1989). We're on season 4. How does this relate to our movie? Well, we have things to do for this movie, and we can't stop watching this show. So, we had to restrict watching to weekends so we could use our weeknights more constructively. It seems like I should acknowledge that this is sad or pathetic in some way, but I really don't think it is. I love TV, and Kate&Allie is a super bad ass TV show. It's got that classic 80's sitcom style, but with a touch of edge, a dash of feminist perspective, and a pinch of sophistication (except for Jennie's 1st and 2nd season hair or when they were trying to cover up Susan St. James' pregnant belly for a whole season - carrying a mattress up the stairs? laying in a hospital bed for 3 episodes? giant bunny costume for Halloween? hilariously 80's sitcomish endearing but probably not sophisticated). Point is, we're working so hard on the movie and the movie peripherals that we've given up our greatest joy during the week. That's puttin' the ol' nose to the grindstone.

Looking Back

I'm going to make a slightly different kind of post. I've been looking back through the still pictures we took while on this movie making adventure. I'm glad we took as many pictures as we did because it really serves as a great reminder as to how this thing came together. There is one image in particular that caught my attention. Its me shooting our dance scene. I am cramped in a bathroom some 125 feet from our dancers. Shooting zoomed in fully on the HVX. We didn't use our Brevis for this shot and I am having to shout back to the crew to let them know I'm ready to shoot. We planned and planned for this movie. We had gear that we only dreamed about on there shoots. Yet here I am with the basic camera, just a tripod and I'm yelling out action as loud as I can. This is what Independent moviemaking is like. We had three people on crew that day. Thankfully we were able to get a great makeup artist at the last minute, and this dance number was the culmination of 5 weeks of practice and months of work. I guess it just reminded me that you get it done how you can with what you got while you got it. We're not shooting Super VHS anymore but we're not on a great big union production either. We are somewhere in between and hey it works.

-Charles