Goodbye, Carlo.

Well, it's official. I am finally leaving for Oz on Wednesday. School starts a week from now and I am excited to turn back the clock and be a student once again. I even bought a brand new notebook to seal the deal. I'm psyched because the subjects I'll be taking this sem are Scriptwriting and Directing, Film Production, and 3D Animation. Stuff I can really sink my teeth into. Not to belittle the theoretical courses I took up last semester but I've come to realize I'm really not the paper-writing type. Unless off course it's a script of some sort.

Speaking of which, I finally completed my first draft of Saving Sally. Which means I am now an official scriptwriter. Off course the first draft is shit, as is any first draft is, but that's beside the point. The important thing is I was able to start with a 'FADE IN' and end 91 pages later with a 'THE END.' I got from start to finish and I'll chalk up the experience to one of those baby step moments I have had in my career. If anything it really has given me the confidence and shattered the air of impossibility that I once used to associate with writing a script.

How boring were the Oscars today? At least Eternal Sunshine and Sideways got the script nods.

It's been a long time since I've had 'summer vacation' in the student sense. I've been on one since December and I can honestly say it's beginning to bore me to tears.

I'm still in Manila, anxiously awaiting my new student visa, which is taking dramatically long to process. To keep myself entertained I played in the last local Ultimate frisbee league with the Alabang Dragons, and while it was great to get back into shape, catch up with old friends, and re-live a small bit of my Gameplan lifestyle, nothing changes the fact that losing still sucks. Bitterness aside, it was inspiring to watch people who couldn't throw forehands to save their lives in the past become league superstars. That made me decide to get back into disc in Sydney full time where playing with white folk will hopefully do me some good. Off course I'm saying this now because school hasn't started and I haven't entered my world of perpetual busy-ness yet.

My vacation hasn't been all play though. I've been working full time on the 'Saving Sally' screenplay for director Avid Liongoren, and it really is a challenge to write a full-length. The tricky part for me is trying to avoid the temptation to make the characters talk too much. Watch a Pinoy teen movie and listen to the dialogue- don't you notice how characters talk and talk for 10 minutes just to get to one simple point? I'm trying to show more things visually rather than tell them. It's not easy, but I never expected it to be.

The two things that keep me going are the fact that this will be made into a movie soon, and that it's a great warmup for when I finally get down to writing my own film.

Going off topic, I see that my blog's had 1,000+ hits so far. That's a puny number compared to superstars of the blogging world (hello superbianca!), but a thousand hits is plenty enough for me and I'd like to hope that there isn't just one demented sicko out there clicking on my site 1,000+ times. So please rid me of my paranoia and say hi.