It’s been a busy day.

            I woke up at 5:30 a.m., to get muffins and brew a pot of coffee for what has become one of the most epic Marlon work-a-thons since last March, when a rotating skeleton crew shot an entire third of the film in a single day: over forty minutes of footage over the course of a fifteen-hour shoot.

            This morning, Tyler came over to work on color correcting the assembled footage. The current cut runs approximately 100 minutes. Today, Tyler corrected a quarter of the film. We ate muffins. Then it was lunchtime, so we ate pizza. We drank more coffee than can conceivably be good for any organic being, human or otherwise. When Tyler left for work at 1:00 p.m., I was more excited, more energized about this movie than I have been in a long time.

            (You try maintaining manic passion for a project that takes over a year and a half. It’s rough work, let me tell you.)

            The movie looks…good.

            Having been editing with raw footage for so long, waiting for my tech crew to become available again after break, the look of the uncorrected, underexposed rough footage­—and therefore the rough film—sort of sunk in as how our movie was going to look. Not great. Like it was shot on iPhones. Like shit, I suppose is what I’m getting at.

            Then along comes Tyler, and suddenly I’m watching a movie that looks like someone who knew what they were doing shot it. The shots make sense, the color evocative, the lighting moody and layered. The footage looks good, like something you’d expect to see in an indie making the festival rounds…and suddenly I have hope once more that Marlon actually can mount a festival run, actually does have a chance at life beyond my four-terabyte hard drive.

            Marlon is coming to life.

            I’m exhausted right now, so I’ll have to keep this brief (or fall asleep at Bird’s desk). Instead of wording you to death, just take a look at these stills from the first twenty minutes of the movie, and believe once more, if your faith has been shaken, that you and me and a handful of my friends have made one hell of an indie film.