dispatches

The One Minute Window

It seems to be a recent pattern around here--show up at the house, and you get a documentary about you.

The Anarcho-puncturist

The latest production. 30 minutes of capture, 6 hours in Final Cut. Wish I could remember all those shortcuts and commands we covered in the workshop.

Digital Journalist has new Platypus videos up

Dirck Halstead has posted news and videos from the Houston and New Orleans Platypus Workshops, including a blow by blow report from yours truly.

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0803/the-platypus-workshop.html

The good ones

This link will take you to two stellar videos that came out of the Platypus Workshop. John Lehmann and Peter Power, from Canada's Globe and Mail, shot and produced these post-Katrina stories. Whatever it is that they put in the water up there, I want some.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/survivingkatrina

Joy is a Cajun Accordion--The Premiere

Here is the "Director's Cut" of my Platypus Workshop video. It's a profile of Bruce Daigrepont, Cajun accordionist, who started the Tipitina's Cajun dance 22 years ago.

You can also follow this link to the video: http://www.viddler.com/dougplummer/videos/12/

And now?

Among the repercussions of my recent video workshop is that there is going to be a serious cash hemorrhage in my life. The first symptom (besides the workshop and 12 days of travel expenses, for which there is no client picking up the tab--my final video cost me about $16 a second), is the need for Final Cut Pro. Apple made sure that projects made in FCP cannot be opened in the FC Express version. Loading the program reminds me of the old days when installing Word meant feeding in floppy after floppy into the machine. In this case, FCP Studio comes with eight CDs, and takes over an hour to install.

Now I've got to think about camcorders. My Canon HG-10 is plainly a toy, and will go on Ebay soon. We're in a technology transition period at the moment, with the Canon pro units behind the curve and still stuck in tape. Sony seems to be the other option, recording onto flash cards, but at a price. There is a lot of jargon to master, and a lot to sort through. Advice out there from someone ahead of me?

It's done

For the first time in a week I feel something like contentment. Fulfilled is more like it. I'm a baby whiz in Final Cut Pro now, at least the .05% of the program I've learned (FCP makes Photoshop feel like a text editor). The piece is emotive, in has a path, and some small complexity in the layering of audio and imagery.  The opening and closing waltz, a sweet melancholic number, is going to haunt me for months. I'm near tears whenever I watch it, but then, nearly anything brings me to tears at this point. Premiere is in two hours.

It will be on the blog as soon as I can figure that part out.

Labile or unstable?

“There's a Second Line funeral parade that's going to come down Poydras in about five minutes.” Most of us abandoned our computers and rushed to the corner. Sure enough, there were two feathered and bedecked figures leading a brass band and a funeral procession. Dancing and joy, down the main street of downtown New Orleans. The clutch of us circled the front of the parade with our pro cameras, and  another dozen tourists took pictures with their small camera and their phones.

I felt the rush of joy and energy as I danced in the street. Then the funeral procession came by. My heart was open, and I felt the wallop of grief from the back half of the parade. This dancing is commemorating a death, and I teared up instantly. I had to turn into the parking lot behind me, where no one would see, and openly weep.

I am emotionally labile these days. Last night I reveled (how many mood swings can I fit into a single day?) in how the opening two scenes segued perfectly. I started to see the rough outline of my piece, with what remnants I could scour that were actually held still for more than 2 seconds. I did my interview and one musical piece on tripod, and everything from Tipitina's on Sunday was on sticks. There's a sweet clip of Bruce playing accordion with his third grade daughter, on guitar, with 10 usable seconds. Now though, I've been at it for 13 hours now, and I am starting to make significant errors. I'm trusting that my sleeping self will tell me how to fix all the problems with the piece by morning, and it'll be in some form resembling finished by the 4pm screening.

Why don't I just kill myself now

My wife Robin is a person built with an even keel. She never gets terribly down, nor is she overcome with rapturous joy. She's merely content, most of the time. I am her opposite: extremes of dark despair and unimaginable bliss. I firmly believe that you have to embrace both ends of that spectrum to accept yourself as a full human being; one cannot have the capacity to feel one end of the extreme without also experiencing its twin.

I have now seen my take from the day. I only want to find a six foot deep hole and pile the dirt on top of me. There may be, just maybe, be enough footage for a one minute piece. Five minutes? I doubt it.

Here's the problem: I went unconscious. In the way I always do with a camera in my hand. That's how I photograph, intuitively, sniffing for the right shot, moving myself around a subject and capturing the moment from that point. And then moving to the next moment, and the next. I handled the video camera as if I were taking stills. I find a shot, then another, then another. The footage jumps and jitters like a cross between a bad music video and the Blair Witch Project.

If you had asked me earlier, I would have told you I had rock steady long takes, with an abundance of room around them to edit. That was before I saw the footage. I had no idea.

It is a necessary part of achieving artistic competence to absorb and master the feedback loop, the ability to see the final result while you are engaged in the act of creation. Through all the processing steps from vision to achievement. For me that feedback loop is absent in this medium. And I got bitten.

Of course, I expect my mood to shift wildly a few more times, before all is said and done.

What a strange sensation

I just got back from shooting for my final project, and I'm strangely exhilarated.  It was a great struggle to imagine what I might need for transitions, I had to stretch to think of what might work as “carrots” for the piece, and I know I made a load of mistakes and missed a lot of opportunities. But I feel wonderful.

I spent the day with Bruce Daigrepont, Cajun accordionist and host of the Tipitina's Sunday dance for the past 22 years. If I had been doing a photograph for, say, a magazine profile, I might have spent 45 minutes or an hour, generously. Usually it's a lot less. In, bang, out of there. No reason to hang around. Video takes more time, which means you get more time to connect. We get to know each other, enjoy each other's company, and, if I can pull it off, the final work is deeper.

The other encouraging piece of it is, this pro camera (a Canon XH A1), though bulky, is actually light. Compared to my typical location kit, it's a fourth the weight. And, somehow, it feels less intrusive. With a still camera, I'm making a lot of effort to capture moment after moment, and those moments are marked by a loud mirror flap and shutter release. It takes awhile to desensitize my subject. Video is silent. There's no state change between on and off, and it feels like I can merely capture. My subjects seem less reactive.

Alas, the fun part's done. There's a two day effort ahead of me to extract five minutes out of an hour and a half of capture.