Waves. Busy. Travel. Many hotels in the last month. Downtown Los Angeles. Las Vegas. Newport Beach. Starpower. Strange birds and seashells collected. Friends discovered and enemies embraced. New endings and old beginnings. Inspiration and the lack there of. Resolve. New discovery. Rejection. Last night, the premier of a movie I shot. It was pretty. But not as much as these from yesterday.

The festival run for Let Me In continues. Below you will find a complete list of all the festivals so far. The cool thing is that it’s going to be in LA’s own Dances With Film Festival in June. This is cool because a feature I shot was in the festival last year. So this makes two years in a row having my cinematography included in this very cool local festival! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m very proud of this video and of Matt’s work.

FEARLESS FILM FESTIVAL
Fort Worth, Texas
Sat Apr 10, 2010 @ 11:45AM & 2:30PM, Sun Apr 11, 2010 @ 1:00PM
David L. Tandy Lecture Hall, Fort Worth Central Library

LONDON INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL
London, England, United Kingdom
Thu Apr 22, 2010 @ 5:30PM
Roxy Cinema, 123-132 Borough High Street

CONNECTICUT FILM FESTIVAL
Danbury, Connecticut
Sat May 8, 2010 @ 12:00PM
Common Council Chambers, 155 Deer Hill Ave

SWANSEA BAY FILM FESTIVAL
Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Sat May 8, 2010 @ 10:00AM
Dylan Thomas Centre, Somerset Place, Swansea

DANCES WITH FILMS
Los Angeles, California
Date/Time TBA (festival is June 3-10, 2010)
Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood

WASHOUGAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Washougal, Washington
Date/Time/Venue TBA (festival is August 11-15, 2010)

WORLD MUSIC AND INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL
Washington, DC
Sat August 28, 2010 (Time/Venue TBA)

Almost done with two projects I directed. Long gestating projects. Painful at times projects. Should be done in the next week. And it’s gonna feel very good. And then on to the next one.

I am also working on a new website and I was going through a bunch of production photos (there are many) and found this one. I’m always smiling biggest when I’m directing. I like making movies and I’ve done a lot of different jobs but directing is the best. What I enjoy most. Most satisfying, fulfilling and challenging in the right way. It’s where I feel most at home.

Maybe its cause I was born a month early but I’ve always felt like I was late. Late bloomer. Late to the game. Maybe you get it and maybe you don’t. I’ll tell you this, if I actually am going to be late for something, it affects me physically. A kind of darkness creeps into the corners of my vision. Cold sweat on the back of my neck and my armpits and groin. I have trouble catching my breath. If you think I’m exaggerating, well friend, your wrong. I hate being late. I’m obnoxiously early. It annoys people close to me often. This will never change. And I don’t think I’m wrong about this.

I was gonna write a post about the last week of my life, I was gonna drop a lot of names and talk about a lot of stuff that happened but I changed my mind. Name dropping is annoying and now I don’t really know where this is going except that I haven’t written in a while and I have a lot on my mind, a lot of things I’m trying to make sense of.

I’m on  Freemont street in Old Las Vegas last Friday night. There’s a free concert going on, over 20,000 people crammed into a couple blocks. It’s insane. The biggest thing they’ve ever done down there. I’m exhausted, on 3 hours sleep, I flew in that morning and I’ve been shooting over 12 hours. But the real work is done, the headliner is playing and I’m resting in a tent behind the stage, waiting for the rest of the crew so we can all leave together. And I hear the first notes from an acoustic guitar and then the beginning of the first verse and it sounds so familiar. It seems to pull me onto my feet and out of the tent toward the stage and I push past a group of people chatting at the base of the stairs leading up and onto the back of the stage so I can see the artists playing. They are apparently the top grossing act in the world in the past year. A country act with real crossover appeal. I can only see their backs as they’re perched on stools at the stages front but I know the song now. It’s an obscure Hank Williams song. A song I LOVE. I love it so much I had placed it in a movie I was working on, silently hoping that somehow I would be able to obtain the rights. It’s a song that completely inspired me with it’s simplicity, it’s beauty and it’s perfection. So now I really want to see this performance so I push back down the stairs and around to the side between the stage and the steel barricade keeping those 20,000 people at bay. I just stand there and watch and I feel very lucky. I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time. You can tell most of the audience doesn’t know the song, they are uncharacteristically still and quiet.

And then it’s over and I go backstage again and with the rest of the crew we shoulder our gear and push through the cops and drunks and wanna be groupies out onto the street and back to the parking garage and take the rental car back to the MGM for 5 or 6 hours sleep because the next day will be even longer.

Sometimes you have a dream or a goal and in the beginning it’s all possibility and magic and excitement and then time goes by and it becomes a chain around your neck. And you can hardly remember what you were excited about. You wonder where the magic went. You wonder how you could have let this happen. You search for the meaning of it all and the lesson you can learn so you never have to feel that weight around your neck again.

But maybe you need the weight. Maybe if you didn’t have that weight you’d just float away to the Moon or Mars or Saturn or some distant unknown place. Or like some strange, pale fish at the deepest parts of the sea you would rise and rise until you exploded from within due to the absence of that weight. Maybe. I think for me, not having that weight is a distant unknown place. Maybe that’s okay. I guess it is.

I miss you Azure.

A few weeks back I posted about Let Me In, the music video I shot for director Matthew Shutt. Well, Matt submitted the video to a slew of festivals and darnitt all if a couple don’t already wanna show it.

First up is the Fearless Film Festival in Fortworth Texas on April 8th to the 11th. A couple of my really good friends from Alaska live in Fortworth so Paul and Anna, you better go see it!

Then is the Swansea Film Festival in Wales UK. I don’t know anyone there but the festival is hosted by Catherine Zeta Jones so maybe you want to take the trip?

I love festivals and I’m so proud of Matts work and happy that this little video is getting a real audience outside of YouTube. Matt was a VERY prepared yet low key director and Kelly’s song is awesome. It was seriously one of the best experiences I’ve had shooting for someone, ever. Makes me all warm and fuzzy just thinking about it…

All I ever wanted to do is work with cool people and make cools stuff. Mission accomplished with “Let Me In”.

-Staley Out

I shot a couple fashion commercials for director Benham Mokri last weekend. Ben is a visionary talent and great to work with. He’s also a good friend. This is a still taken from the Red One in between takes. Good times.