August Evening, the feature that I worked on (as AC and 2nd unit DP) back in 2005 premiered this weekend at the LA Film Festival, and was sold an hour after it showed.The buyer is Moctezuma Esparza, an Oscar-nominated producer of such films as Selena, The Milagro Beanfield War, and Gods & Generals. We should be able to see in the D/FW area by this Fall. I'm excited that the project has been sold.

The first day of the shoot saw us at a chicken barn near Gonzales, Texas. Working amidst 20,000 chickens was easy when compared to the daunting task of eating lunch nearby. I've never seen more flies in my life. Eating a plastic-wrapped sandwich involved unwrapping a bite-sized portion for just long enough to bite into it. Failing to immediately re-wrap the sandwich meant taking the risk of having a small cloud of flies land on it. Of course, then there was the horrible stench of the chicken feces. There was simply no escaping that. Someone left the door to my car open, allowing a few hundred flies to tag along with me for the next day. Driving with the windows open didn't make much of a dent in the population of stowaways. I'll admit that had to be the very worst day for everyone, especially for Elysia, who suffered an electrical burn, and then the nickname "Sparky".

I had a good enough feeling when I met director Chris Eska that he would carry this project through to completion. That's really my biggest concern.

29 June update:
This from August Evening director Chris Eska:

"I just won the Target Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival! I received an unrestricted $50k cash prize for best filmmaker. The jury told me it was such a unanimous decision that there was nothing to debate!!
And they had the option to create one additional award to give to any film in the festival, and they chose to give us another award for Best Acting Ensemble!!!! Crazy. They had me pose for photos with Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Tony Bennet, etc. Aidan Quinn gave me the award. Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe, Kevin Bacon were in the very small awards room."

9 July:
A Reuters news article on the film mentions a shot of a suburban housing development at dawn and credits the DP for the shot. In fact, it was mine. I'm sure that the producers don't want me to go into the gory details of how much controversy there was over the getting of the San Antonio suburban dawn shot, but it's my blog, so here's the straight dope: Yasu (DP) didn't want for me to shoot it, because doing so would violate protocol for crew turnaround time. I was willing to get just a couple of hours' sleep in the name of getting the shot that director Chris Eska wanted, so long as I could grab a nap in the truck on the way to the next location. This was the only such conflict of which I am aware on the shoot, but it was early enough on that it may have set a tone and galvanized morale. After all, I live to shoot and shoot to live.