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.