In morning

Never trust morning people.

It’s a simple adage that has stood me in good stead for the last 42 years. An unshakeable belief that there is something messed up in the internal wiring of anybody that can bound out of bed in the morning with good grace. It’s just not nature’s way. Sure, I understand that it’s a useful social aberrance for Olympic athletes and farmers, but it’s absolutely pointless for us slowly-atrophying city-dwellers. I apply the same filter to people that don’t like Led Zeppelin, and have strangely wound up with a bunch of mostly lazy and deaf pals.

And then, to my great consternation, I only go and turn into one.

Life in the edit consists of long days sat down staring at a laptop screen, concentration muscles worked to their limits as you finesse a frame or two to perfectly match up head positions between shots. It’s a continual balance of video and audio, of technical and aesthetic choices, and neither hemisphere of the brain gets a moment of respite.

In short, it’s bloody exhausting.

So when the day’s work is done, and you’ve surely turned the laptop back on again for the last time of the day to make that final tweak that helpfully crawled into your head as you stood outside in silent contemplation with a cigarette, your eyes, ears and brain have all had quite enough, thank you. Go for a walk. Put some tunes on. Watch a movie. Anything, just please stop thinking.

All well and good, except as soon as I distract my brain away from the undead, that’s it. I have spent more time asleep on my sofa over the last month than I have in bed. It’s like being back on the shoot again.

And so it stays until the first crack appears in my unconscious mind, that moment that used to herald a quick acknowledgment that I didn’t need to be up yet and could safely turn over and go back to sleep. That moment has now become the bookend of a night’s rest, as the zombie virus moves to re-infect my psyche with a speed and virulence not seen since the outbreak.

No point staying in bed. Might as well get up *sigh*.

The good news is that we just passed the sixty minute mark in the edit, and thus the bulk of the movie is already cut and dried. The bad news is that editing is a bit like sanding a piece of furniture – you need to go over the footage time and time again with ever more fine grain paper. It’s a task that’s never finished, only abandoned.

So, no rest for the wicked for a while, it seems.

And all this while any self-respecting gore-hound should have been spending the day in Brighton, joining the 2999 other beautiful freaks in a slow amble around the city centre. Read down, and you find that the University of Winchester is even running a study module on their Media course devoted entirely to zombies. Time to dust down the CV, I suspect.

But until then, don’t anybody lend me any money or tell me a secret. I just can’t be trusted. Awake.