Daydream: My first “lost” movie

I’ve been spending most of today doing heavy duty cleaning and reorganizing of my workspace. I am gearing up for a period of intense work and it always helps to have things cleaned up and distractions minimized. As I was cleaning up my computer, I realized I had almost completely forgotten about What A Beautiful Day For a Daydream.

This is a short film directed by Shogo - his first shot in Japan - and edited by me here in Austin. It’s a cute little romantic movie, but because of some issues with the financiers, I am getting the feeling that this one will never see the light of day. So I thought I would at least post a few frame grabs.

The story revolves around a lonely girl who finds a digital camera left behind at a restaurant. She takes the camera home with her and scans through the images, slowly falling in love with the owner of the camera - who happens to appear in a lot of his own photos. She does some detective work which leads to some clumsy stalking. In the end, it all works out. It’s a love story, after all.

One of the many strange things about this project is that Shogo didn’t have control over his casting. The girl who was cast had the habit of blinking about once every second - maybe even more often - so I found myself making editing decisions to minimize the too frequent blinking. She also didn’t know how to ride a bike. This was kind of a problem because there is a key plot point that involves the girl stealing a bike and riding it to a theatre. The shot below is just about all that remains of that plot point. We edited around it, threw on an animated title card with some sound effects… and it kind of works.

These shots don’t really give an idea of how difficult this project was to edit. It’s very layered. Sometimes there are up to three layers working at one time. I think Shogo wanted even more than that, but after a certain point it just started looking muddy to me. I imposed a limit of three layers on screen at any one time. There were also quite a few motion graphics. I probably worked on it for 2 months and by the time I shipped it off it was in pretty decent shape. We delivered it to the producers and it went in for a sound mix. That was the last we ever heard about it.