Happy New Year from the Tiny Orphans Country House!

What a year! Holy Hannah! We were present for the wrap of production on Souvenirs (now called ‘Memorial Day‘), produced a short called Icehouse, judged the Minneapolis chapter of the 48 Hour Film Project and ran a documentary production company.

I’m somewhere between sad it’s over – and wholly exhausted!

At the moment I’m convalescing in the country over the long holiday. I’ve seen Time Square on a NYE midnight, smelled the sharp wind off the Grand Marais bay, danced and drank and argued and laughed on any number of my last thirty Eves.

This year I’m watching Lady Gaga perform on the tv and listening to my mother confound herself over performance art and pop culture. (CLASSIC!)

There’s a whole list of goals for 2011 taped to my edit station back in Minneapolis.

I don’t *really* remember what was scribbled on that napkin – other than making at the very least – two whole films in 2011.  And finding screening venues in exotic countries and drinking martinis with WIFT chapters hither and yon.

Whelp, I got 1 film made. The art of being an independently funded film entity is not starving too much or squatting on friends’ couches more than 30% of the year.

Oh the glamor of living the dream!

I left the freelance world in May, in all its potentially lucrative panic attacks, to have a go at organic fashion and settle into something of a more “settled” life. It’s been hard. My god I miss the 5am call times, drinking Brueggers coffee boxes and the feng shui of hauling beefy baby stands in my bombed-out Saab. I really do.

But there’s a wall one hits – with an expensive vanity degree that turns into an all consuming hobby – where you wonder why you’re compulsively broke and still trying to push the sisyphean boulder up that hill.

So I took the summer to write and reevaluate my masochistic love affair with film production.  As a result Tiny Orphans has a episodic length script in preliminary prepro. So I guess that answers that question.

We’re also preparing to shoot another film for Z-fest again. Come 2012 (next week) we’ll be entering rehearsal and prop construction.  I’m more excited than I know. It could be the amount of moonshine my pops keeps handing me that’s taking the edge off of just about everything. (Thanks dad!)

I’m so thankful to have so many great collaborators, both new and old, and I’m looking forward to what Tiny Orphans will accomplish in what is gong to be a great year. We’ll make a detailed list of accomplishments to forget about once back in the city.

Well it’s 11:02PM and the ball dropped on NYC. There’s so much confetti on the telly that I’m getting it in my eyes. Pops just handed me a plastic glass of purple champagne (?) – so…

My Heart is ravisht with delight, when thee I think upon;
All Grief and Sorrow takes the flight, and speedily is gone;
The bright resemblance of thy Face, so fills this, Heart of mine;
That Force nor Fate can me displease, for Old long syne.

CHEERS TO YOU.