"Wow! You sure look comfortable, here!"

Jerry points to the many pillows cushoning my otherwise cheap office chair. What do you expect? I LIVE in that cheap chair right now and when I edit I'll sit there, in the same position, for 6 hours straight, forgetting to blink, to move, to get up.

Yesterday I caught myself forgetting to... Breathe....

The prison scene had me so rivetted I was holding my breath... Forgetting even the most basic biological reflects known to man. I found myself realising I was doing it once the scene was over.

Coming out of that flashback was no easy task. Where Johnny was at at this point of his life, there is no coming out of it... Ever. I find that dramatic scenes must be treated with the upmost respect, so to not yank the audience out too fast and shock them... Like deep sea divers, they must be allowed a moment to readjust to "normal" pressure.

I am sitting in my jammies, bear foot, with both legs on my computer desk. A strange position that seems to work best for me, for long editing sessions. My feet and ankles were swelling up, thus the idea of keeping them up. Strangely, it is comfortable, since I piled up all pillows at hand and shoved them under my.. well... "you know what" .

Jerry's leg keeps bouncing up and down. He's too hyper to sit still. He can't wait to see the latest edits. Lately he's been my guinea pig. I'll test my edits on him. For exemple yesterday he pointed out to me he could not understand what Johnny was saying in the Prison diary scene. I could. But that's because I wrote it LOL.

Back to the drawing board. I found that adding more highs to the otherwise low gravelly voice Tim used when he read the diary, helped a lot. That's when my recording engineer days come to the rescue. 20 years spent in and out of recording studios with my band, and later producing my own records and recording them myself... You learn a trick or two .

I continued editing long after Jerry left... Completing the climax scene and about to move to the drop dead gorgeous time laps when I noticed I had fallen asleep while dragging my mouse over the segment.

So I shut everything down before I could fuck things up and went to bed.

Woke up this morning and went back at it, recording my reading of the second letter. Came out real good. I always have a very good voice when I first wake up and used to record vocals (and still do) that way for my music project ALTERNATE FAITH.

ALTERNATE FAITH (www.alternatefaith.com), which is basically, "me" has been around for many years, charting on over 15 radio stations in the late 90's. I even hit #1 on two of them. Having given up the pursuit of music few years ago, I now find myself in an incredible position: To write music freely, anything I damn please, for my film. No more formula, no more "you got to write a single! Make us a hit" bullshit. No need for verses / chorus / solo contrived templates. I feel more musically fullfilled now than I have ever been.

My next musical growth will be phenomenal, as I will now expend further into orchestration and scoring. I have been hearing the theme score of the film in my head for an entire year... And now, in a mere week or so, I will actually RECORD IT... And share it with the world. I suspect it will present a high level of challenge, but added to my abilities to produce haunting eastern vocals as well as strong Western melodies, I think the end result will be well worth it... I can't wait!

So step aside Bethoven, here I come.

Below: me, fronting ALTERNATE FAITH in an unplugged performence in 2005