Posts made in February, 2012

College Desk Column to Launch!

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Think Outside The Box Inside The Box Media is proud to announce that a new column, College Desk, is coming to the site on March 1, 2012.  Written by Think Outside The Box Inside The Box Media’s editor and writer, Alexandra Joan Bennett, College Desk will be articles, interviews and opinions from the desk of a college freshman. Alexandra Joan Bennett is a writer, journalist, ultimate Frisbee player and student of Business and Marketing at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.  Originally from Lee’s Summit Missouri, Ms. Bennett was the editor of the Lee’s Summit North High School newspaper, the Northern Exposure, for 3 years, where she gained a vital...

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Day 60: Leaping in a leap year.

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Day 60:  Leaping in a leap year.

Day 60.  I had no idea I was taking my yearlong experiment in prolific creativity leap in an actual leap year.  I only noticed that there were 29 days in February a couple of weeks ago when scheduling an event on my iPhone calendar.  When it dawned on me I thought, “how fantastic!  I have an extra day to get everything done I want to get done this year!”  And I’m going to need it because when I think back to what I was doing in the last leap year four years ago—I was doing the exact same thing!  Working on my documentary.  Only in February of 2008, we were still in production.  We shot through June of that year and then again for a few weeks more in the winter of 2009. ...

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Day 59: Fuzzy

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Day 59:  Fuzzy

Day 59.  Today is fuzzy.  Exciting but fuzzy.  I’ve just confirmed the date and time for the first meeting between my first project’s writer and director, Im prepping to launch my first contributor’s column, the paperwork for my taxes is strewn about in piles by category, scene 12 waits to be finished, and I’m hungry.  Thus the exciting but fuzzy bit.  It’s all exciting but I’m a tad fuzzy due to said hunger and low blood sugar.  This reminds me of H.A.L.T.  It’s those wise folks at Alcoholics Anonymous that came up with the handy H.A.L.T. acronym.  I’m not in AA but when an acting teacher told me about H.A.L.T., it just...

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Day 58: Nothing is always something.

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Day 58:  Nothing is always something.

Day 58.  It’s a rainy Monday.  My strongest urge is to do a whole lot of nothing except eat brownies, watch all the Oscar nominated films I haven’t seen yet and the rescheduled Daytona 500.  But my full email inbox, an incomplete scene 12 and the pile of “waiting to be done taxes” reminds me that “nothing” is not an option.  Although “nothing” sounds appealing, it’s not really what it seems.  As I think outside the box inside the box it dawns on me that “nothing” is never really just nothing, it’s always something.  If I create nothing from what I have, I’m still creating something.  If I did...

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Day 57: Fun

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Day 57:  Fun

Day 57.  My meeting with the potential director for the first piece went really well yesterday.  She had a bunch of great ideas and an interesting take and vision for the project.  I believe she’s my first director!  Just as I start to fall asleep last night though I think, “did she say something about a scene with kids in Texas?”  My heart shoots out of my body and races along with my mind.  Texas?  Kids?  Oh god.  So high maintenance.  Will that cause problems with my SAG contract?  I instantly spiral even further down into a pile of panicked lunacy.  How am I ever going to actually do any of this?  Why in the hell did I say three films?  I need to reread Day 11...

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Day 56: Signs

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Day 56:  Signs

Day 56.  I wake up to an email with the subject, “weird”.  It’s from my partner who has been on a shoot in Maryland for the last couple of weeks.  He comes down to the lobby of his hotel this morning to find there’s a convention going on.  The convention just happens to be for students who run college EMS organizations all around the country.  Turns out a couple of the teenagers that were in the organization, Darien EMS, Post 53, at the time that we followed it for our documentary are now college students and actually there at this convention.    How incredibly random is that?  What an incredibly small world.  Wow.  I’m blown away.  To me this isn’t weird, it’s a sign! ...

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Day 55: Order, please.

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Day 55:  Order, please.

Day 55.  The contractor is finally done!  He also finally buried his father yesterday. Apparently, “things taking longer than originally planned” was the theme for both of us.  There was some snafu with the church.  “It’ll be nice to have closure,” he said.  I couldn’t agree more.  Today I’m stepping away from all my work on the doc and the new venture to attempt to put my house back in order. It’s been three months of bathroom rugs and old journals piled up in the hallway, boxes of CD’s and old movies crowding the couch in the front room, lamps on the floor next to the bed because of missing end tables.  It’s the perfect day for it too, sunny and 72 degrees.  I can...

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Day 54: But what I really want to do is direct!

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Day 54:  But what I really want to do is direct!

Day 54.  On Day 6, my lack of common sense to ask for directions when I need them came up.  I wrote, “This entire experiment in thinking outside the box inside the box and creating from what I have is all about asking for directions and listening to and receiving directions.”  The biggest element to me pulling off my feature films is the helmer AKA the director. This will be the most important “direction” I ask for all year.  As far as I’m concerned, besides having a brilliant blueprint—the script—the director is the key to the film being an awesome, entertaining, festival accepted movie or a pile of poop.  And I have to pick the right one for each project because,...

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Day 53: Excitement is in the air!

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Day 53:  Excitement is in the air!

Day 53.  Excitement is in the air.  My friend is on a roll with his fundraising campaign for his film.  Another friend is falling in love.  Yet another friend got great news on the health front.  And me, well, I’m not only excited I’m also hair trigger excitable right now.  I have my sights set on scene 12’s completion, I’m beginning to figure out the direction I want Screenwriter Monica to go in for the rewrite, I need to have a discussion with a potential director and I’m out of the walnuts I put in my gluten free sugar free brownie mix.  Damn!  I have to go to the store.  Or maybe I should take the lack of nuts as a sign to stop the...

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Day 52: Gotta get me some focus!

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Day 52:  Gotta get me some focus!

Day 52.  I get distracted easily.  Always have.  My attention span is brief.  Especially if what I’m doing is not in my wheelhouse.  I can produce, act, write, gab, watch movies or eat all day long.  Editing isn’t just outside my wheelhouse it’s all the way in Detroit.  Although it’s not exactly fair to generalize “editing” as what stops me from getting in “the flow” since I’ve never attempted to edit anything other than my documentary–which I’m swimming through 1200 hours of footage with no script for.  It’s really more about that fact.  I threw a fit yesterday when I couldn’t find this one moment in the footage that I know is in there.  I...

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