The Nitty Gritty of Creativity

A non-linear video editor (NLVE) is a truly wondrous piece of software. The ability to organize and track hundreds of video clips, and to display several dozen showing their relationship to each other, while viewing in one place the result of  their combined visual impact – Wow! Not to mention that you can do the same thing with the sound track from each clip, either combined or separately from the visual. I use a program called Sony Vegas Pro. It’s not as famous as some others like Adobe Premier, which a lot of professionals favor. Maybe the others have some added capabilities but if so they are way beyond my skill level to use. My sound editor is Audacity, which is freeware but seems to be the preferred tool for almost everybody who works on their own rather than in a studio.

A project like Dragons in the Box involves a lot of self-education. I want to make text crawl across the screen in some places. How do I create that effect? I really botched the exposure on one set of interviews – how, and how much, can I restore those sequences to something like a normal look? Here is a great shot, but the camera jerked in the middle of it – how can I smooth that out?

There are a lot of decisions to be made. How long does this scene need to go on to make the point I want to make? Does this sequence need narration, or is it self-evident? Two or three people made the same observation during interviews – which one(s) do I include? On an interview where I messed up the exposure, should I eliminate that problem by just leaving it out, or is the interview so good it should be included even though flawed visually?

This is how I’m spending my days and much of my nights. Telling you about it sort of violates the rule about sausage and politics, but the good news is that I’m really pleased with how the result is turning out. I think it will tell the story we want to tell. It’s shaping up to be about 48 minutes in length, which is less than the typical broadcast documentary and there are no commercials. Maybe this is not objective, but sitting and watching my early cuts all the way through, it doesn’t feel like that much time goes by.

I’m hoping to get the final cut reviewed and send it to you next week. That amazes me, I really thought I would be pushing to get to this point by July.

The Film is in the Can

Actually the video is on a bunch of little SD cards each about the size of a postage stamp. I spent the week of March 14^th at Fort Polk watching a massive exercise, mostly through a camera eye lens. Almost 4,000 soldiers and hundreds of vehicles moved in, and were presented with a theoretical massive explosion and radiation release at a theoretical nuclear plant at the theoretical town of Fullerton, LA.  I learned the Army is very good at treating theoretical things as if they were real. Nobody jokes, nobody cuts corners, nobody says “Oh well, it’s not real.” There is a total acceptance that they may have to do this for real someday, and the only way to be ready is to treat today as if it were that day.

To an outsider the process is confusing but not chaotic. You get the impression that every single soldier knows what he or she is supposed to be doing, and is performing in a complicated dance in which every other soldier has a complementary place. The confusion is because you don’t know the dance, and it goes away when suddenly some piece of work – a row of vehicles, a set of medical tents, a bunch of soldiers suddenly converging on the same place at the same time – comes together with no real advance notice. One minute everybody is running around and the next minute there is this result.

PHOTO: Soldiers erect a tent for the decontamination line.

There were all kinds of major functions at work –military police, medical, transportation, aviation, engineers, logistics, civilian law enforcement, and civil defense agencies. My focus was on the three chemical companies, totaling about 270 personnel. They conducted two main missions. One was reconnaissance and surveillance, or R & S. This consisted of going into an area designated as radioactive, wearing protective gear, and finding out what hazards were there to threaten rescuers and medical personnel who would come in later. The other mission was Mass Casualty Decontamination, or MCD. This consisted of assessing the condition of civilian casualties – some walking, some wounded, all presumed contaminated – doing triage and then decontaminating them so that medical personnel could treat them safely.

The civilians are represented by role players from nearby communities, and I mean these people Play Roles! There was screaming and begging and retching, and falling down in convulsions. All of which the soldiers had to deal with while keeping the lines moving.

So now I am back home for the editing. The first step is to go through everything and pick out all the pieces that, when strung together, will tell the story. More to come.

PHOTO: Soldiers in protective gear interact with stranded civilians.

And Here we Go!

March 1. The first solid milestone in the project is the completion of the Indiegogo funding campaign. There were 38 online backers plus several people sent me personal checks outside of the website so our total is about 76% of the goal of $6200. This means I can get good quality basic equipment, but the second camera for interviews will be an older model that records to tape rather than direct to digital media. This will mean a slightly lower quality for some shots but nothing that anybody will turn up their nose at.

Speaking of equipment, here are some photographs of what I’ll be carting around with me – two cameras, two microphones, two tripods, and a whole bunch of lenses, cables, batteries, tapes, and SD cards. With some practice I’ve gotten this packed into the backpack and tripod bags shown here. I’m training myself to unpack and repack it all; thus far I’m down to about a 10 minute set up time for a sit-down interview with two cameras in place.

I’ve also come up with a mnemonic to make sure I don’t forget anything during set up: Some Large Bears Can Ingest Fishy Appetizers. Which stands for Sound, Lighting, Background, Composition, Iris, Focus, and Audio. If all of these are right, you’re going to have a good shoot.

A lot of the footage will be what the pros call “run and gun” which is chasing things as they happen and trying to capture them with a single camera. Two big challenges in run and gun are 1) pointing the camera where the action is before the action goes somewhere else and 2) keeping the camera steady enough that the viewer can tell what they’re looking at.  The latter is a problem because my hands don’t have what it takes to hold the camera steady for a long time and a shoulder mounted camera or steady cam rig costs about 10 grand. After a lot of searching I found in England a rig that will hold the camera on my shoulder and in fact let me operate at hands-free. For only a couple of hundred euros, yet. So I’ve been walking around the house and the neighborhood getting the angles and balance right on this thing, looking like some kind of cyborg man.

Then next big event is going to Fort Polk for some pre-training interviews on March 13, and then “in the box” activities will be March 14-18.

More to come,

Walt