Day 5 was the easiest day of filming yet. Two Portland actors (Eric Custudio and Peter Coehler) came down and we went to Waldo Hall to shoot at a classroom. Oh yeah, and this girl named Courtney Sargent (don't know how to spell it) filled in the role of Classmate 2 that day! Like, 30 minutes before we started shooting I realized that a classmate was in fact not coming and so I asked Courtney and she said yeah. Courtney is friends with Heather Shwalm, who is playing Kelly.

To give you an idea of what we shot, I have to tell you how the film is narrated: All this crazy stuff happens in Keith's life, and so he writes a short story about it for his Fiction Writing class. The day comes for the class to review and critique his story, and the film is narrated by their critiques.

So we have these three classmates, two of whom are complete idiots in different ways, a genuine writing buff, and a professor. Together they offer input on how the story is going, what they liked and didn't like, and how it could be changed. All the while Keith has to sit there and take it without getting to say anything (until the end that is).
The scenes are pretty much your standard Abbott and Costello routine, with two students saying ridiculous things and the third student tring to keep everything real. The professor doesn't help, because he's not much more than stupid either. The scenes are actually pretty funny, and will offer a nice break to the sometimes intense or boring parts of the movie.

That said, I'm kinda gonna change some things about the movie. It started out being a critique on legalism, and the story set up Keith to be this Christian on the outside and Calvin a Christian on the inside. The point was it's better to be a Christian on the inside than on the outside. This is true, but the problem is that I was saying Calvin is a good Christian, but he's obviously not. Regardless of how innocent he is, he acts very violently towards people, which is obviously not Christian. Keith is of course a self-righteous monster, but at least he represents Christ and follows what he believes (to an extent anyway). So while Keith is obeying God to the best he can and Calvin is kinda throwing the Word out the building (though he believes in his heart), I was saying Calvin was the better Christian. I am not saying that anymore. Keith has tremendous problems. He's extremely judgemental, depressed, dogmatic, even adds to the Scriptures. Calvin has big problems too. He's not connected with reality, he doesn't heed the Word of God even though he understands it, and he scares and distresses almost everyone around him. Both of them have problems, and both will come to grips with them later in the movie. I'm no longer making a case for either one of them, just presenting who they are, how they act, and how they come to change. It's now more of a character drama than a straight up work of fiction.
There are still hints of the theme from before, and I still think Keith's problems are worse than Calvin's, but I can't with a clear conscience present Calvin as being a much better person than Keith. I mean, who would you rather hang around: a guy who judges you all the time and seems to never have anything positive to say, or a guy who endangers your life a couple times a week? I personally would say the guy who endangers your life, but if you took a survey I bet it would be either pretty even or weighted towards the judgemental guy.

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