Almost 6 Minutes Now

Had another great day editing.  It felt like it was editing itself as one beat flowed into another.  And then it didn't.  My knowledge of iMovie11 is OK.  Maybe if it was great I wouldn't be worrying again but it's only "OK." 

But I still love what I got: my opening sequence and the first storyteller.  There's lots of music, there's lots of heart.  Well, I think so anyway.  And soon there will be more storytellers and musicians talking about their experience improvising to stories with complete freedom, and talking about jazz and spirit and everything I find important in order for us to heal each other.

Now how to get to the next transition.  I have my ideas but the documentary has it's own ideas too.  I wonder whose ideas are going to end up in the finished product.

4 Minutes and 34 Seconds

I'm pretty amazed at how the editing is going.  It is Wednesday night again.  I'm finally home after my day gig and then the editing room.  It's pushing 11pm.  I'm wrecked.  But tonight they had to pull me away from the Mac.  I would have edited all night if I could.  And you know why?  Because this thing is starting to edit itself.  Maybe it's because there is so much music in it.  Maybe it's because the interviews are so powerful to me.  But whatever it is, one thought leads to another which in turn tells me what the next edit should be.  And this is happening so beautifully that my Wednesday Night Mentor over at CAPS-TV told me not to jinx it by saying so out loud. 

I'm 4 minutes and 34 seconds in.  I've got my opening sequence, the beginning of the concert, Todd Goehner's interview, the first storyteller, a lady named Donna, and then Donna's interview that goes in and out of her performance.  Donna slept in her car for 6 months and she now lives at River Haven, a tent city near the harbor in Ventura.  I think she's been living there about 2 years.  She's a brave soul that lady.  Donna wrote a poem for the "Voices of the Homeless" performance so she could get some emotions off her chest.  I think the poem rocks.  The whole quartet improvised behind her.

I can't believe how scared I was to start the editing process.  Now I can't wait for this Saturday when I get to edit again.

Wednesday Night Again

And again a night at CAPS-TV Ventura.  This time I crapped out by 9:30.  It was my final stab at the training CD of Final Cut Pro and seeing how much I could digest.  And I mean final.  Thankfully, my professional editor friend called me back and we're set to spend three hours editing music in Final Cut Pro with him at the helm so I don't have to learn it right now.  Now I can stay with iMovie and finish editing "Voices."

In fact, before I popped in the training CD tonight I transferred the two interviews I shot last weekend from the SDHC cards onto my hard drive.  Then I got lost in the opening sequence again.  Then I almost couldn't stop.  But I did stop.  I put the hard drive away and started watching the training video.  And then I crapped out.

I must say the interviews I shot last weekend with the rain outside looked just as soft and beautiful as I hoped they would.  HOWEVER, the rain stopped and the sun started going in and out of the clouds and my exposure went in and out along with it.  But worse than that I couldn't get sound at first because the sensitivity had been changed on the lavalier kit.  Whoever had used the lav kit before me had changed the settings.  I was losing my mind.  Finally we got it all to work and I was typically embarrassed at my inexperience showing.  Once again, I thought, "WHY am I trying to do this?"

Anyway, the last interviews are done and it is time overdue to edit, get into it, and get it done.  Maybe I have one more interview to shoot -- I mean re-shoot.  But other than that, it's Editing Time.

I wonder how much gray hair I'll have when this is over.

Last Wednesday, This Saturday

So last Wednesday night I finished my day job and went directly to CAPS-TV Ventura to start viewing the Lynda.com Final Cut Pro CD for instructions on how to use this program.  The teacher was very cool, a guy named Larry Jordan.  He’s a good teacher but I must not be a very good student because after four hours of Final Cut Pro instruction, I knew this was going to be an even steeper learning curve than iMovie was.  My mentors at CAPS are encouraging me to segue to Final Cut as soon as possible but for now I'm sticking with iMovie.  Enough with the learning curve.  I want to finish editing “Voices” before I die.

This is not to say that I’m not going to finish the initial Lynda.com CD.  Larry, I’ll be listening to your dry humor and mega instructions again next Wednesday night.  But after that, it’s back to iMovie and trying to trick iMovie into doing the things I want it to do.

And I’m going to HIRE an editor to edit together the three cameras of my WAV concert from last year.  I’ll have it edited little by little as I get the extra cash.

OK, so that was last Wednesday.  Now it is Friday and I’ve just taken out the camera again for two more interviews scheduled to shoot tomorrow.  These interviews are of another two audience members who were at the live performance that August afternoon in 2010.  And this should be interesting because I’ll be shooting while it is pouring outside.  Rain in Southern California happens maybe four times a year and this weekend will be one of those times.  I'll have no light kit with me so this will be a test to see if my instincts are right.  To see if I get enough soft light coming in from outside to create a pretty and flattering picture.

Learn as I go . . . Learn as I go.

Oh and by the way, today somebody asked me about the Performance Page on my website (http://tonijannotta.com/perf.html).  They wanted to attend one of my performances.  But all the performances listed there are from last year.  I don’t have a single thing coming up.  I’m going to have to change that page.  Man, did that ever feel bad.

Opening Sequence

I did it!  I started editing "Voices of the Homeless."  I have built the one-minute opening sequence with a portion of Scheila Gonzalez Santiago's beautiful soprano saxophone solo over titles and 30 seconds of 3-Dog Mike fishing on the pier in slow motion.  I also dumped the eight sections of the "Voices of the Homeless" performance into eight iMovie "Events" to cut in back and forth throughout the documentary.

I guess trying to edit my three-camera concert from last year, and realizing it couldn't be done in iMovie, that it would have to be cut in Final Cut Pro, was the final push I needed.  I said "the hell with it" and started on "Voices."  "Voices" can be done in iMovie because I shot the whole thing with ONE camera.  The performance footage (shot with three cameras) has already been edited together.  Every cut I make will be mountains easier.

But now I've decided I MIGHT be able to edit my concert myself IF I learn Final Cut Pro.  So, Wednesday night I'll be back at the editing bay with a Lynda.com CD seeing if I can understand anything about Final Cut Pro.

I've got the bug, that's for sure.

And it's easy to get that bug when you have no funding.
:-)

A Day Without Editing

CAPS-TV Ventura is closed every Thursday.  Now that I've gone into hyper mode and find myself at the editing bay nearly every lunch hour and absolutely every Saturday, I found myself experiencing a weird sense of R&R today.  I mean, I went outside.  I felt the sunshine.  I bought some groceries.  It almost felt wrong.  Perhaps I'll need a 12-step group soon for Edit Bay Withdrawal, but for today it felt good to take a step back.  It forced me to let things percolate.  :-)

I'm thrilled, I'm bummed, I'm thrilled, I'm bummed

Today I was thrilled AND bummed all in the same 15 minutes.  Talk about a steep learning curve.  Blessedly, the video guys that help me at CAPS-TV really are great.  So patient.  So very patient.  There's Evan and Donald and Gary, who talks so fast and so much that I can only follow maybe 1/2 of what he's saying.  But what I can follow is valuable.  Way.

So today I figured out how to do a cutaway with a fade in and fade out and if you could have seen my Happy Dance you would have been embarrassed for me.

Then I saw one other problem -- with each cut to a new camera I lose the sound associated with the original clip.  From what I can understand, the process of saving the audio, in iMovie11, is so complex you would be better off in Final Cut Pro.

But I don't have access to Final Cut Pro.  The station only offers iMovie11.  It's public access after all.  It's a gift!

I'm thinking it might be time to stop pussy footing around and just start editing the documentary.  Editing 3 cameras of a musical performance appears to be way, way harder than editing with one camera, which is the way I taped all of Voices of the Homeless.

This afternoon I used my lunch hour once again to get 1/2 hour in at the editing bay at CAPS.  Tonight I have a 4-hour slot.  Tonight I need to transfer the interviews of last weekend onto my hard drive.

I feel like such a no-nothing.  This learning curve is soooooo steep.

I was so thrilled and now I'm so bummed again.  I wonder where I'll be by 10 tonight . . .

Long Day's Journey

And now finally it is night.  What a day.  I felt hopeless and then I felt elated.  Man, am I pooped.

My time in the editing room was both frustrating and terrifying.  iMovie 11 is a great program but it sounds like it's just not up to the level of Final Cut Pro.  Unfortunately, iMovie11 is all I have to work with and today iMovie11 was just not cutting it.  Literally.  And I was just not cutting it either.

Today I could not get the program to do what I wanted.  At CAPS-TV Ventura we are lucky.  There are people there to help you.  But even they couldn't figure out why the program was not doing what we were asking of it.  I felt disheartened.  And then I realized again that if you are going to experience frustration while you're learning an editing program, have those frustrations on a project you don't care deeply about.  Right now I am trying to edit a jazz concert of mine.  It became so difficult at one point I wanted to give up completely.  But the good news is that I also realized today that editing the documentary will probably be easier than trying to edit together 3 cameras of music.

What a process.

After my four hours of disenchantment, I drove to my first interview of the afternoon with "Bill."  Bill had been in the audience the day we performed "Voices of the Homeless."  Notwithstanding the cat meowing and the wind blowing, it went pretty well.  Bill is very well spoken, pretty darn political (a Democrat), and he's a guy who really cares about our homeless population.  He's also a social worker and a guitar player.  He was a good subject.

But "Dani" was amazing.  Dani is also a social worker who had taken her lawyer husband to the performance that day.  She, too, has a lot of feelings for our homeless.  But the reason I got some great material with Dani was not because she is in social work.  It was because she is not a musician.  Dani didn't know the musicians improvised all the music for "Voices."  What a great expression she gave when I told her.  Today I can say I "caught it on tape."

And then at the end of the interview I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to say to wrap it all up.  She said, "I guess I just wish we could help families who are struggling BEFORE their children grow up and find themselves standing on a street corner holding a sign."  Then she asked me to stop taping because she started to cry.

What an interview.

I almost felt like Oprah.

A Long Saturday

Tomorrow should be interesting.  I'll have the camera AND I'll be in the editing booth.  First I'm going to try editing some music in an effort to learn more about the program.  I'm using iMovie 11.  So far I can fade the transitions from one shot to another,  I can overlay sound traks, I can copy and paste and delete and perform a number of cool functions that come in dialogue boxes that I'm starting to understand.  Then after my time allotment is up at station, I'll be a cameraman again.  I haven't picked up the camera now for 4 weeks while I've been editing.  I hope I remember how to work it.  I'm going to interview a social worker who was in the audience the day of the Voices of the Homeless performance.  I want to find at least one more audience person to interview.  I've interviewed the people on stage.  Now I want to interview the people who saw it.

And by the way, today was a pretty exciting day in the Department of Small Change.  CAPS-TV Ventura, our local public access station and my home-away-from-home, not only offers their training and their equipment to its members but it requires you to produce programming.  Today my first little production, "Judy Scott Tai Chi Chuan" aired for its entire 5 minutes and 28 seconds at 1pm.  I ran home at lunch and watched it on television feeling like I was watching a real television show.  Well, I WAS watching a real television show.  It was just on a little public access station. 

And WOW the feeling of accomplishment I had!  I mean really, I felt good. 

I hope I have that same feeling when I finish Voices of the Homeless and watch it air on Channel 6.  I hope I have that same feeling when I submit it to various film festivals, or whoever I can submit it to.  I hope I'm proud enough of it.

But first there is tomorrow and more shooting, and more sitting in the editing bay trying to learn what the hell I'm doing.