Sunday, 24 August 2003 | Belloq

There's a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which a fly lands on an actor's face and crawls into his open mouth while he's delivering his lines. Rather than stopping the scene or spitting or reacting in any way, the actor continues, seemingly undisturbed.

Which is the image I tried to think about when I held the digital video camera in my hands and pushed a hard plastic piece into my face until I was fairly sure it made a reddish dent, in an effort to hold the camera as steady as possible. When I stood on a ledge with one eye closed and the other focused in the viewfinder, trying not to think too much about the space beneath me. When a drop of rain slid down the inside of my arm, when something itched, when my tense muscles needed stretching and lengthening. He let a fly crawl in his mouth. You can stay still for a few more seconds.

Sometimes I start to count silently, "one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand," when I try to endure something uncomfortable a little longer. I counted when the drop of rain crept toward my armpit.

Endurance and sore arms, yes, but filming so far has been fun. The director has given me a good balance of autonomy and guidance, and I've gotten pretty comfortable with the new, memory-filled creature, who lets his subjects move and talk, rather than trapping them in a single, silent 2-dimensional rectangle. By the end of a day of shooting, my eyes are framing everything in front of them, not unlike the shape-castles the brain builds after playing too much Tetris.

Here's a picture from filming on Friday evening. I think it looks a little fake, like we're standing in front of a poster.

This weekend I also shot the first roll of film with my Super 8 camera, which I bought in July: few seconds of break dancing, and about three minutes of Wigstock. I have no idea how it's going to turn out, and I have no projector, so it looks like it's going to be a while before I find out.