[flickr id=”9512886489″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]It must be a result of having grown up exposed to so many American films, but this past summer I haven’t been able to help but feel somehow more connected to a lot of films and television shows I used to watch. The landscapes and scenarios feel familiar.

[flickr id=”9515676664″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]I stayed in a small harbor town called New Buffalo. It reminded me a lot of Capeside from Dawson’s Creek. But then I’d just think about what happened to Abby on the pier that one night, and it became too much.

[flickr id=”9512886501″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]My hotel was just off the I-94 freeway, and sleeping to the hum of a rarely perforated line of (semis) articulated trucks has made me think I’m actually a terminator. One of the first things I’m doing when I get back to Chicago, after sleeping, will be watching Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

And Star Trek, just because.

[flickr id=”9512886519″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]Forty one days of principal photography later, we picture wrapped last Tuesday. It was bittersweet; on the one hand we were all exhausted and glad of the break, but on the other hand we had become really close having spent the summer together. We had become family–like some sort of travelling circus. But, on that Tuesday night, our Greensman Terry lit a bonfire in his backyard. Surrounded by green field and forest, he blared music from his cabin. And it was exactly like that party scene in Dazed & Confused.

I’m in Kansas now, shooting my thesis film. I recently saw Man of Steel–the Kansas storyline with eleven-year-old Clark and Kevin Costner was the best part–so, now I think I’m Superman.

It’s been a long and adventurous summer, but finally, after Thursday, I have some time for sleep.  Then I’ll be kicking off my second and final year of graduate school at Columbia College Chicago, and go back to walking around Chicago, humming the theme to E.R.