2004-06-12 - 9:41 a.m.
All I said was, �If I get through this week without killing anybody, it will be a miracle.� It was amazing to see how many seemed to believe me, and how many different people ended up hearing it, so that when they cautiously crept into my office with a question or needing some help, they�d sheepishly beg, �Don�t kill me, now, but�.� I love having that kind of power!
But then I�d say, �Nah, you�re safe, but nobody else is,� and they would breathe a sign of relief and relax. I can taketh away and then I can giveth it back.
This whole school year had been a nightmare from the very beginning and it did not let up, not once. This month was the worst, and this week was the worst of this month. I feel like saying, �The other four of the quintuplets that make up �me� died from overwork, so now it is just me having to do it all.� So far I haven�t had a chance to use that line on anybody, but there is still tomorrow. There is also still tomorrow for somebody to die.
Now the kids are all gone, but I had been too busy to say any proper good-byes or to even feel grief over their disappearance, particularly the ones who have graduated and I most likely will never see again. It�s hard to say your goodbyes when you know that while everybody else will be leaving for the day at 1:30 in the afternoon (after the second graduation), I won�t be able to get out of there until after 6 P.M. Oh well, I�ve done a good job of avoiding working late most of the year, insisting on keeping to the standard schedule, but sometimes you just can�t do that. Too many things to be done before all of the teachers will be gone for the summer.
It�s funny, though, so many spend the latter half of the year wishing for summer to come and getting rid of all the students, but the second they are gone (it sounds almost as if every living creature has fled the forest and we�re now in some kind of nuclear winter), you miss them terribly. It must be like how a widow misses the sound of snoring.
Well, I love the kids and I knew I�d be sad once they were gone, so I never looked forward to it. And particularly this bunch of sixth graders, I somehow got a lot closer to them than I had all the previous sixth grade classes, because of the trip video. Some people manage to use a camera as a distancing device, as if the lens were a six-foot-long telescoping pole with which to push people away. But not for me. The lens ended up being a device for inserting a probe into their hearts, or else creating a magnetized tunnel that drew them nearer to me.
I realized in the three months that I was working on this movie like an obsessed madman that I had most of those kids faces in front of my eyes nearly twenty-four hours a day. In real life, you don�t get to look at people�s faces that closely, it�s rude, it�s embarrassing, and they just won�t let you, they will turn away. But when you film them and edit that film, cut out the bad parts and figure out the good parts, you have them and their beauty and their good nature at your disposal. It�s wonderful therapy and I recommend it for any profession in which you need to love the people you work with. For teachers for example, and for those of you who are or are planning to be one, take note, because I am dispensing some very serious advice, here. I would highly recommend that you get yourself a video camera and editing software for your home computer and during the first week of class, film interviews of your students and then edit the whole thing into as good of a movie as you can make. It can be the typical �what did you do this past summer?� kind of thing, or maybe something deeper, such as �what are your more precious dreams?�, but the point is to guide them into revealing something candid into the camera and then through a process of frame-by-frame editing, you have to put how they present themselves into their best light. I promise, they will become emblazoned on your heart and you will have no choice but to love them with a love that will last the whole school year. I only wish that I had known something like that at the beginning of the year, instead of discovering it nearly at the end of it, but I do know it now, so maybe I will be able to take advantage of that marvelous understanding next school year, or elsewhere in my life.
Even now that that video project is complete (and it came out pretty good, I might add), I am amazed at how much unstoppable passion I put into that whole enterprise. I�m not even really sure where it all came from, but suddenly it was there and I was living up to my name of �Pitbullshark.� Every day I couldn�t wait to get home and edit the film, and once I got into it each day, I didn�t want to stop to eat, or even sleep. There were many a night in the past couple of months in which I did not stop until close to 6:00 A.M., and that is when I am supposed to wake up. I haven�t pulled that kind of all-nighter since I was a college student at Berkeley. And I really just can�t do that. I�d have to get at least an hour�s sleep, which meant that I would be getting up an hour later than I was supposed to, which meant that I�d rush off to work without even eating breakfast. I literally seemed to breathe and eat video images and sounds.
This whole movie was 100% learning curve. I literally knew nothing substantial about movie making at the beginning of this project. Anyone looking at this completed film with a knowledgeable eye might be able to see how I improved step by step. Or maybe not, I don�t know�but I sure see it.
Apple jokes about �when you send your film to Cannes,� at least, I guess it�s a joke, because for the average unpitbullsharkable person, the software is just not professional enough for anything beyond a nine-minute movie about your kid�s birthday party. But I do not, and did not, take that as a joke. As far as I am concerned, I could send something to Cannes that I made with this system (not this particular video, but surely something that will come after). And I guess that attitude came from all the Outfest film festivals that I have gone to, in which many films, particularly the short ones, were just something somebody filmed with a video camera and edited at home, and they were no less enjoyable than a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. I�ve seen some four minute films at Outfest that could knock your socks off.
Probably there was one film in particular I saw at Outfest last year that specifically inspired me, or made me want to have a video camera and film the stuff that goes on around me. It was, admittedly, a higher-budget professional film. Nevertheless, it was filmed in video (probably with a $12,000 camera, not my $500 one). It was the French film, My Life On Ice (French title: Ma Vraie Vie En Rouen, which means �My True Life in Rouen�), which I reviewed on the Internet Movie Database, and if you read that review, you might get a better understanding as to why I would want a video camera of my own. However, despite my thought I would film my own life, I find that other people are way more interesting and thus my first film wasn�t about me at all (at least, not denotatively), but about a school trip that I took with the sixth graders. (I�m definitely there, though, as the hidden voice or movement behind the camera, reflected in the window glass, and even full-on in a two-minute scene of my own.)
The process of editing the visuals was nothing but a total joy. I pretty soon figured out the best techniques that worked for me, so that whereas early in the process a three-minute scene took about six hours to edit, toward the end of the process I could whip through an hour of raw footage pretty quickly.
Audio was another story entirely. For some reason, editing the audio was very difficult with iMovie, or else I just didn�t figure out an optimum technique with it like I did with the visual. Every day the slope I had to climb seemed to get steeper and steeper. But I did manage to do it, although I�m not 100% happy with the audio results. It was just too difficult to keep fine-tuning it.
But the worst of all was making the DVDs, which I had wanted to have in addition to VHS videotape. At first that was nothing but trouble and the initial DVDs were absolutely demonic in result. Clips were switched around, the volumes and positions of the difficulty-edited audio tracks were changed (not only on the resultant DVD, but also in the original film), plus there was a lot of just plain junk on there. I did lots of troubleshooting (WEEKS worth) and trial and error and reading on-line forums and investigating all the possibilities. I completely erased and reloaded all the software twice, and did several equipment checks to see if there wasn�t something damaged with the hardware. It would have been so much easier to simply give up, conclude that it was not possible to make a DVD like I had wanted. But for some reason, I just couldn't let it go.
I found a very helpful website, all on the subject of managing to get iDVD to actually make a watchable DVD, and with the audio in synch with the visual. That site suggested many different things to do that few people would have ever thought of or even understood. But by then, I wasn�t able to put into practice the suggestions from the site. Instead, the computer just started crashing.
Finally I had to face the fact that the movie had somehow gotten corrupted during the first DVD-making process and that was what was causing all the trouble, not iDVD or iMovie. Fortunately I had made a final back-up of the movie by exporting it back onto digital videotape via the camera, so I was able to erase the movie completely off of the computer�s hard drive and then load the movie back on clean straight from the back-up camera tapes. This time (after two weeks of frustrating effort leading up to that point), the computer made perfect DVDs. So finally I had achieved success with this project!
The woman who founded this trip and has been its leader for the past twenty-eight years loved the movie and said that it was the best one of the trip she has ever seen. �You don�t know how much it means to me,� she said. I am so happy she likes it. And every time she sees me, she mentions once again how wonderful it is. She said, �I just sit and relax and watch it over and over.� She�s even sending copies of it to our tour guides back east, something she has never done before.
Students seem to really like it, too. They kept coming up to me on campus to tell me how good the movie was�normally they forget they ever knew you once we are back. And during the reception after the sixth grade graduation today, some of their parents came over to rave about the film. So even though I started out knowing absolutely nothing about video making, with this first try I ended up with a two-hour documentary that so far everybody seems to think is really good.
Well, I�m not going to say �It�s Cannes, next time,� but I am thinking of what my next project will be. I have a couple of great ideas, I think, although probably what will end up happening will be something that will surprise me from out of left field! If it fills me with the unstoppable passion that this project did, I can�t wait to see what pops up.
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