One final note about the Labor Day shoot.  At the end of the day we’re sitting in the VIP section behind the stage waiting for the files to transfer from the camera cards to one of our hard drives and I started thinking about the great crew Michele put together, and that today’s shoot was our Abbey Road recording session.

Labor Day we shot at the Detroit International Jazz Festival. The shoot went well. We got good footage, a couple of impromptu interviews and some great performances. 

Labor Day was our last shoot day on the Smile project. Some people would say I’ll never be done shooting and my reply to them is, the world is full of people walking and talking and I need them in my doc.  But of course there’s no more money and Michele (the Producer) would kill me if I tried to get them all.

Now the documentary we’re working on is titled When I Need to Smile and the title comes from the song Gretchen Valade wrote that launched Mack Avenue Records. 

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Ok, I love the Smile project’s producing staff.  Yesterday I was talking to one of the producers (Alisa) and we were going over some things when she made a remark about the Christian McBride shoot on Monday.  And I said, “I didn’t know any of that,” and she said, “Yeah, that all happened."

Ok, it’s the night before our next shoot, and I feel unprepared.  I don’t know why; it’s not like I haven’t been involved in plenty of news productions that were woefully unprepared, but I digress.

The last two weeks have been busy, shooting in Los Angeles and Detroit.  After this past Monday’s shoot we have a small break, but we’re planning to go back to LA in August to shoot Kevin Eubanks’ band at a jazz club called The Baked Potato and to New York to shoot legendary jazz pianist Dave Brubeck.  So, although we are not shooting this week or next we are planning.   

Today we shot reenactments for the Smile project. The day started at The Hill restaurant in Grosse Pointe where we staged what will be the opening segment of the documentary.  Because we shot MOS (motion without sound), we have a stripped down technical crew. 

The day started out just fine until the director changed where the first camera setup would be. Never mind that I’m the director and me and the DP picked a spot three days ago, here I come with “wouldn’t the shot look better if we put it over there”.  Or never mind that me and the producer discussed this very spot and decided not to use it a month ago because of cost. I did it anyway. Never trust the director. 

It’s been a hard days, day and I been workin like a dog. It’s been a hard days, day I should be sleepin like a log. Hey, that’s kind of catchy. So you can see we were hard at work all day, sitting, wasting time, checking email and lining up work for the next job.

Today’s production problem started before I could get to the shoot. I’ve only been to Mack Avenue Records once, and I thought I remembered where it was, but I didn’t.

Today I got off a plane at 6:30AM, went home for a while and got ready to do a small shoot for the Braylon Edwards Foundation. It was a bad idea.