As well as being one of the cartoonists for my university’s paper, I’m an office worker for one of the chemistry professors. Among other things, I make lots of copies.
Yesterday I had a gigantic review packet to make copies of, and as I lifted the stack of freshly printed pages, over a ream high, I had a flash back to my first real experience with university copy machines. It’s May of 2007, the script for the second fifty minute film my friends and I made has just been finalized, and my sister and I have gone with our dad to use the copier at his office.
The script is about twenty pages long, and we describe it as “an anachronistic romantic comedy.” It is our triumph, this work. We have built a film around our strengths, the games we play, and the fantasy world we grew up in. Our actors are cast in roles that we know they will thrive in. A few costumes have been created, a few more are in the works. We’ve rehearsed some scenes, done improve games in character, built a set, tested it, dismantled it and rebuilt it in a space that worked better. We’ve tested cameras, the microphone, and various methods of lighting. And now–now the script is being printed. Now the dream is a concrete thing which we can hold in our hands. We will spend a week and a half doing nothing other than film work, and much of the rest of the summer picking up bits here and there that were missed and editing our footage.
We lose track of the number of pages we’ve printed and how much this is supposed to cost, so we just shove our dollar bills into the can that usually accepts dimes. The scripts come off of the copier, warm, crisp copies.
In the night air as we walked to the car, they glowed. The portend gave us heart, and we moved boldly forward into a grand summer of filming.