9 hours till ROLLING!

YOU GUYS. I can't believe tomorrow we actually start filming. Today was probably the craziest day this week, as I don't think that I stopped moving from about 8 AM until right now as I write this. We officially have all of our gear, all of our crew on a call sheet, all of our food, all of our props, all of our set dressings, and the only thing we need is tomorrow morning for our actors not to get stuck in traffic on I-five south. All of the kickstarter fundraising in the world sure won't put an extra couple lanes on I-5.

I think one of the coolest feelings for me today was realizing that the more and more that I am involved the small projects, the more and more I become excited about the cool stuff to get to use. Today we picked up our camera and grip gear, and our 1st AD, Jason Roberts, picked up the steadicam box and said "this is our first official work!". It's pretty awesome to think that only a few weeks ago we had our fingers crossed for the Kickstarter video, and here we are.

We are lucky that we get to do what we love, and that people believe that we are good enough at it to make a difference while doing it.

Tomorrow's scenes will be focused on the breast cancer support group meetings. Some of you may remember from our explanation on our Kickstarter video that June goes to this group with an interpreter; we will have a lot of opportunity to embody June's feelings with the camera in terms of how we capture the spoken dialogue and her feelings of detachment. We are so lucky to have a wonderful group of ladies with us for the support group scenes. Some are people from the community who I don't know, and some are people I do know. In every facet of this project we've been able to include people who have been very closely affected by breast cancer; it's humbling and meaningful to us to have people on board to feel that this story is close to their hearts as well. These scenes are spoken dialogue, and we are so fortunate to have a pro on set with us to mix sound. I've learned sound is actually one of the most important and most finicky elements of filming and postproduction.

I had a really cool conversation this morning with our sound mixer over at Switched at Birth, Robert. He told me about how important it is to capture all the sound possible even if the scenes themselves don't have any spoken dialogue. I was so happy to hear this from a professional because the 'producer' side of my brain said, I don't know if we can afford to pay a sound operator everyday! But my 'language-loving' side of my brain said that so much ASL is happening with different sounds for emphasis: voice, palm hitting palm, contact with parts of the body-- all of that is so important. It reminds me of something that one of my teachers said to me when I was taking ASL: We were having a discussion about the meaning of "Deaf- experience". He told a story about someone who said to him once that sounds just didn't happen in his world. My teacher said, "sound absolutely happens in my world, I just experience it differently." That is one of the things that is so awesome and exciting about this project; we have several different worldviews all coming together into one story. I also want to say a big thank you to Tali Dagan for coming tomorrow to take production stills, and photographs of some behind-the-scenes action for us to share with all of you see you can see what it looks like when we're doing what we do. For the next four days I will be posting at wrap time, and maybe during lunch or break if I can get my sentences together! Here we go!