End of Summer

The last few weeks have mostly been spent at the gym, with almost 2 weeks of impromptu summer camps and all my usual night classes. A certain someone going off to Europe meant I also had some extra time to do a lot of writing. Bittersweet I guess, but it is awesome to be creating and climbing into all of these imaginary worlds again. Unlike when I am just writing for fun, or with an eventual goal of turning them into something, this time we had specific plans for everything we were writing.

Johnny spent days at my house working on a one-pager submission. He came over so we could start working on it Sunday night, then decided he wouldn’t leave until it was done. This meant waiting at home while I was doing summer camp or BJJ classes, then writing late into the night to make sure we had the story down.

We finished it on our drive to Montreal for Labor Day. Most of my family was out of town, but I did get to spend some time with my grandmother, and stopped by for my great aunt’s birthday. Friends from the gym were in Montreal as well, so we met up for supper on the Saturday and came to swim at my place on Sunday night after everyone had come to BJJ that morning.

I had a catching up/production meeting with Christine as well, and think it is amazing how far this project has come. What started out as a small reaction shot with a bit of dialogue for our stunt demos has turned into a 20 minute short with possible drone shots. And we went from who can we get really easily? To who will be the best person to make this story come alive? The project is getting bigger, and so is our investment in time, money and everything. By the end of the shoot I will have ripped my bleeding heart out of my chest and held it out for the world to see (not literally, but close) and I am so terrified, but so much more excited to do this.

It was mostly a relaxing weekend spent with friends and family, but I also got to work on organizing my room, and finished writing a short film I have been working on/talking about/putting off for months. Then, on the drive back to Toronto, Johnny and I worked on an idea for something we hope to film in the next coming months.

Some other cool things I’ve done:

Women in View networking event with my ladies from TAWC. The panel was on navigating TIFF, but it’s the undertone of women supporting each other throughout the evening that left me feeling inspired and excited about what is next.

Krav maga. I got a groupon for this ages ago and keep meaning to go, but I am always too busy. It is about to expire, so I made time. The first class had a guest instructor from France, so I was also the unofficial translator, and the second only had 4 students, so we got a lot of hands on training and adjustments.

A bunch of background days. I love being on set. I love meeting people with similar interests and talking about the industry. So getting paid to write movies and hang out with people is always fun. It’s especially fun if you happen to end up interacting with the actors in the scene, listening to them do comedy and a Q & A or discussing afternoon tea places on the breaks.

YEAA meeting. We are having a fundraiser for the 6 shorts that were made last month, so stay tuned for more details 🙂

We had a guest teacher for NOGI. I’ve met Ilan before, but this was my first time attending one of his classes. He taught us a bunch of BJJ warm ups we could do on our own in a small space (so you don’t have an excuse to not train) as well as real world applications for some of the moves we were doing. Since most of my BJJ is stuff I can’t use unless I’m already on the ground, it is always fun to learn stuff you can do and stay standing up.

Trina’s pool party. I met Trina at the ACTRA conference and finally made it to one of her pool parties. This girl has such a huge heart. It was lovely to catch up, chill in the hot tub and stare off at the Toronto skyline

And finally, TIFF started this week, so I went to the Young Filmmaker’s TIFF Opening party with Ayisha and Dave. I have another such event to get to tonight, but I’ll tell you all about it in my next post!

“Most filmmakers will tell you that if you write your own films, it’s the most expensive psychoanalysis you could get. It’s costing a fortune, it’s costing millions, just for me to go to an analyst, but it’s wonderful because [then] you can go on living.”

-Denys Arcand