The Big Think

So this is day three of production for Paradise Recovered, the independent feature I’m working on. My job is the head of the sound department (and the main mixer, and the boom operator… you get the idea). Today was another good day working with fun, talented, and creative people. One of those days where you work really hard and go home exhausted but happy. The house we’re shooting in this week is an old home in central Austin with a rickety air conditioner. Unfortunately, we have to turn off the A/C when we shoot (I’m not a popular guy when I call for it to be killed!). It was 104 outside today and we actually had to leave the house and go outside to cool off. It was ridiculous. Nobody had a thermometer, but I would guess it was at least 125 in the house with all the lights. Crazy!
We managed to get about 7-9 pages shot today, which is a pretty good pace for a small crew. The writer/producer’s blog is here and there are some flickr pics here. I encourage you to keep up with both locations for a blow-by-blow of the shoot. Andie (the producer/writer) is great. She’s doing an absolutely wonderful job of taking care of her cast and crew and I know it keeps me really motivated to do my best work. I’m having a (very hot!) blast. I’ll try and keep you posted how things are going, but right now most of my time is taken up by either being on set, or sitting at my computer for several hours every night transcribing my sound report notes for the editor, then reorganizing my gear and preparing for the next day. I usually take a freezing shower every night and sit under a blasting a/c until my nose turns a beautiful shade of blue.

Hey! I just found a super secret behind the scenes video of our location this week on YouTube. Thanks for the house loan, David!

Get the gig. Research equipment needs. Hold breath and buy new equipment. Train on new stuff. Travel to Colorado. Shoot B-roll. Set up interviews. Lights in place? Anamorphic lens attached? Move that light, it’s too hot on his head. Whoops, there’s a shadow- gotta shift everything. Put up a blanket to block the sun. Need a reflector over here. I’m only one person! Thank wife because I’m actually not doing this alone. Get to know soldiers so they trust guy with the camera. Interview soldiers. Try not to get emotional as you hear their stories (on and off camera). Feel burdened to do them justice. Travel back from Colorado with 13 hours of footage, obsessively protecting it from every stray magnetic field and cosmic particle. Spend days importing all the footage. Spend weeks logging everything. Listen through hours of music to get exactly the right cuts. Move clips like puzzle pieces around on the timeline to tell the story. Figure out what the story actually is. Decide that wasn’t the story after all and start over. Reduce 7 hours of interviews down to 15 minutes. Further distill to 10 minutes. Cut out all but the best 6 minutes. Put everything into a logical order. Now make it all work with the music. Now cull through the 7 hours of B-roll for relevant footage. Find a great shot but spend two hours fixing part of it. Fit it into the timeline. Repeat until the story is told. Endure days of crushing self-doubt even though you’ve done it before and know you can do it but still can’t shake the idea that the final product will be a steaming pile of donkey offal. Spend a day doing a full audio mix. Spend hours laboriously getting rid of every “uh, um, er” just because they couldn’t take TWO SECONDS to say it right the first time. Spend several days tweaking the visuals (what’s the editing “language”? Does this clip feel better here… or here? Should I stay on his face an extra five frames? How long should this fade last. How about this one? What’s the best ending shot?). Go back and do the last ten steps when the client sends you “new” stuff they want to incorporate. Realize that none of the new stuff was shot anamorphic. Try to fix new stuff. Give up and use amazing photos instead of bad quality interviews from new stuff. Spend two days fighting with Final Cut Pro to make it output anamorphic footage correctly to iDVD. Realize that iDVD ignores the anamorphic flag. Curse under breath. Repeatedly. Have moment of panic that it’s not going to work and the client will be furious. Realize you didn’t charge enough. Have Lee bail you out because you don’t know how to use DVD Studio Pro. Thank Lee profusely. Spend two more days doing final tweaks (color correction, smoothing transitions). Burn test DVD. Stand back and watch final product on big TV.

Smile.

Smile.

Burn 40 DVD’s and send to client with invoice. Get caught up on sleep.

Realize that, no matter how much time and how many decisions went into the project, someone on the client team will inevitably find something that’s not to their taste and request a “little” change that will mean you have to go back fifteen steps to correct it (honestly, it’s like taking the salt out of a cake). Be grateful that you built language into the contract that you’ll get paid a princely fee if this happens. Realize that you still don’t want do change anything.

But no matter what happens from here on out, the DVD is done and you can look on all the thousands of little decisions and know that you did a pretty good job and, even though you don’t know everything there is to know about this incredibly technical, incredibly creative field, you might not be a total hack after all.

Realize that you have not just a mountain of unrelated work to do, but an entire mountain range.

Pause to enjoy the view. Take a breath. Start climbing again.

urgh… there are so many wonderful clips that I want to use in the military video. So many incredible stories and amazing conversations. It’s maddening and a little upsetting that the video only has time for so much.

My cutting room floor is littered with the outpourings of grateful hearts.

Editing the military week video and it’s very hard emotionally. Not only seeing the faces of these family members whom we had the privilege of getting to know, but also the realization of what could happen and how their lives could be changed.

They are brilliant, funny, and eloquent volunteers who understand the situation better than any pampered news anchor. They are not the children that those journalists would have you believe. Their spouses support the soldiers with a humbling sort of fierce dignity – the kind that, to witness, makes you feel like you’ve intruded on a very personal moment. Every soldier wants to go back and help the Iraqi’s through the first tentative steps toward a stable society. They all have a personal and intense sense of responsibility and honor, and they all think of the Iraqi’s as a battered but noble people on their way to a better life. Not as pawns in political shouting matches, but as people with histories, names, and a great amount of pain in their past. They speak with pride about schools they’ve built, the villages they have helped, and the comrades they have lost. And they are very aware of what their service costs (and might cost) their families.

It’s hard putting the video together because my memories of that week are still very fresh, and I have to get across to the viewer (donors) how grateful the families were for their time together. Unfortunately, when I do my job right the video tends to affect me as well, so I can only stay at it for a while.

It’s coming along nicely, though, and I’m amazed again at how much good, subtle music can add.

Legendary voiceover artist Don LaFontaine died yesterday.