We shot! And it was good. I'm really happy with the footage we got tonight. I just went back and looked at a few spots on the tape to make sure sound and picture were there. Now I can go to sleep without any lingering thoughts that maybe the tape was bad, or the mics weren't plugged in or anything like that. Kris stopped by the shoot tonight, which was nice. She was in town for the night, and she sat on Chris' stoop and read her book while we shot on the street.

It felt really good to write, "LOL TAPE 1" on the tape case tonight. It made everything feel official. It has to start somewhere.

The energy was there tonight and from the few takes we did I will be able to cut a nice scene. Everything's off to a nice start. We are all getting along and working well together. The performances are fine, with enough space left open to improv that I'm getting some really nice moments to work with. I can always feel those moments when they happen. It's a magical thing to be looking at the LCD screen and listening through the headphones and to suddenly realize that you are totally enchanted by what's happening in front of you. Suddenly it's not just you and your friends pretending with a camera. You know you are capturing something that's worthy of being in a movie. Something that's going to transcend the screen. Because right there in the moment you forgot that you were making a movie and you were busy enjoying one in real time. That doesn't happen a lot, but if it can happen once or twice per scene, I feel like I'm doing OK. The goal for me, as always, is to set everything up in a such a way that it can happen as often as possible.

I'm going to work tomorrow morning, and I'll try and come home early and cut something. I'm dying to dig into the footage, and I know that the only way I can finish this film by the end of August is to cut it just as fast as I'm shooting it. I can't get lazy and let the footage pile up. I need to be tenacious, so that the last day is shooting is pretty close to the last day of editing the rough cut, and then I can spend some time fine tuning everything. Right now it's not a chore at all. I am super excited to hack it apart and see what I can come up with. I know that in a month, the idea of spending another whole day in my apartment staring at the computer will start to get really old, but for now I can't think of anything I'd rather do.