Well, its been several days since the 13 of us came back from the future…  (Oh, for those of you who are not tracking on this one, Japan is actually a day ahead of the United States. So when flying from Los Angeles to Tokyo, you’re actually flying into the future.  Pretty sweet, huh? Now the Japan team can truthfully claim to have lived 2 weeks of our lives in the future.)   Anyway, after a few days of processing I have come to realize that I learned several very important things from my trip to the future… or Japan, which ever way you’d rather look at it.

First off, I learned that a dedicated crew can really make just about anything happen- they can even accomplish a 38 scene script within a schedule that is, in all truthfulness, a day and a half too short.  On top of that, over half of the crew had never done their particular jobs for any film before this one.  Simply finishing a film with a crew that had such seemingly minimal experience would be tremendous enough, but to come out with the amazing product that we have is truly a testament to everyones hard work but mostly God’s answer to prayer.  Thanks guys for your tireless commitment even on all the days that didn’t work out as we’d planned.

Second, great actors are magic.  The pleasure of getting to work with Yui-san for an afternoon and Yugo-san for an entire week was truly unbelievable.  I’m not sure that any of us really understood the script that we were trying to make as well as Yugo did. I can’t count the number of times that I watched him do a scene and I thought, “Oh, thats what this is suppose to look like. That makes so much of this script make sense. I really like this thing now.”  Very few student projects ever get the chance to work with actors that have such amazing talent and subtlety in their performances.  What an amazing honor we have just had.

Lastly, a cross cultural experience just makes everything cooler.  As this was my first time out of the country, there was no shortage of things that amazed me.  Every meal was an adventure. Every trip to a new location held some exciting new experience.  I feel so enlightened about humanity as a whole, having simply walked amongst a people that do not share my worldview or most of my presuppositions on life.

This has truly been a wonderful experience and I can’t wait to see the final outcome.

Congratulations again guys. You all did great. I am very proud to have been a part of this shoot.

Harmonium out.

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