#132 Handmade Film Screening

In this show you can hear a recent screening of the film, Handmade in America at the Community School of the Arts in Mansfield CT.

Heather Bunnell, the Arts Coordinator of the school and Susan Gerr, one of the potters featured in my film, start off the show with introductions, as do I, to a crowd of of over 100 people.

I don't include the recording of people watching the film, but you can view the complete 20 minute film at Vimeo using the password: lorezfile.

The remainder of the show is a Q&A with the audience.

#108 Editor's Confessional

Countdown to final project delivery. Days 11 & 10.

A lot of hand wringing, but there's hope too!

#107 Roughcut on the run

Day 14 Editing
Day 13 Shooting
Day 12 Driving home through heavy, sticky traffic

I'm still pulling together the entire story of my film, still in rough cut mode. I'm just beginning to set boundaries and eliminating individuals wholesale, because the film isn't long enough to include more than a certain number of faces and voices. I don't know what that number is, but I've already eliminated 1 of 4 key interviews I did with potters. I found that when I introduced each person at the beginning of the film, one individual didn't fit. It was an odd experience that I had never had before and I it hit me like a vague itch as I was assembling the cut. It was completely apparent when I saw it full blown, along with my class, during the screening I reported on a few episodes ago.

It's one of those gut feelings you need to cultivate. As painful as these choices are, I know that hanging on to scenes, footage or characters that don't move the story ahead is like driving full speed ahead into a mud-hole. And nobody wants that.

Wise or not, I chose to give up a night I would otherwise be editing, in order to attend a series of talks at school by professional editors and filmmakers. Jay Rose was one of the highlights, as was Michael Phillips of Avid. The main message was geared towards the younger students, about finding your way into the media business, even if it means being a coffee toting intern. The critical thing to achieve is contacts and develop a set of work references that will lead you to your ultimate goal.

Five speakers, they all said the same thing: Be persistent and persevere.

The next day I used my evening to take some hirez stills at Sawmill Pottery, Dot Burnworth's studio. I have great interview footage of Dot, but I had to leave early the day of the shoot and got very little B-roll, particularly of her work.

One of things I realize I must, must, must do going forward, whenever I finish a shoot, is right away, within 24 hours at the most, review the footage. I didn't and a lot of time passed before I reviewed it. When I did and realized I had little to no B-roll (poor planning and poor execution) and by then it was too late to arrange a 2nd shoot. The best I could do was take digital stills and use them in a pan and zoom effect. I haven't tried this in HD before, so I will have to see how well it works. It better work, because I'm counting on B-roll to hide a lot of jump cuts.

#95 Wk70 Post Audio

Been at PAB, expected to have posted this and the next show before I left. No time, as usual.

This episode and the next was in the can and waiting for post before I left for Canada last week. I thought about post dating these episodes, but that seems a little dishonest.

Podcaster's Across Borders was a great event, met a bunch of people and got a lot of ideas to chew on. It wasn't a technical conference, it was more about networking and idea sharing. I've never been to the Portable Media Expo, now called New Media Expo, which will be out in California later this summer, August 14, but I have been to Podcamp in Boston.

All three events are different in how they approach social media and there's something valuable to be learned from attending all of them. Podcamp and PAB are within driving distance, but California is too far for me to travel this year. I would say that PAB was the most informal. The schedule was packed though and most conversations I had were short and had to be followed up at the end of the day's sessions.

Give me a few days and I'll have a post up for that, along with some brief interviews I recorded.

Talking about whining. What do you want from me? Well, that's the question this time around.

I would like to know how real I should be reporting the student experience; it's not just the subject matter in class. I believe that how you cope with the demands of school will tell you how you will deal with the pressures of production work in the real world. Just another undocumented learning opportunity in the curriculum of life.

I've reached the point where I have enough material to begin editing and begin shaping the story of my film. I've got a lot of work ahead of me with almost 300 gigs of video, about 12 hours of footage. Organizing this much footage is going to be critical in order to meet the September deadline for the final cut.

Over the past week I had the following shoots and classes:

• Two days shooting a Raku firing
• Shooting B-roll at Sturbridge Village
• Interviewing Dot Burnworth at Sawmill Pottery

• The class this week was the beginning of Post Production Audio
• We're going to score music for a film we've already created
• Using sound effects and foley on a commercial
• Using the audio tools in Avid and FCP
• Outputting the audio form a film to OMF for editing in a dedicated audio application, like Pro Tools.
• The physics of audio, including the inverse square law

• Last day of the week I met with and interviewed Ron Sbardella, a veteran potter of 25 years.

#93 Wk69 Editing II

Continuing shooting.

A Raku firing class with Susan Gerr of Birch Mountain Pottery, Old Sturbridge Village, a recreation of a New England village in Sturbridge MA and another potter, Dot Burnworth at Sawmill Pottery. This puts me over the hump as far as enough video to begin editing.

Check out the Digital Production Buzz episode for May 22 and listen to the first interview of Norman Hollyn, an editor and teacher at USC, he has a lot of interesting comments on learning how to edit. At 11:50 or so into the podcast he makes a comment that strikes me as both simple and profound when it comes to summing up the message of a film when you begin editing.

#90 Wk66 Editing

Links in this Show:

Birch Mountain Pottery - Mug Day

Old Sturbridge Village

Fort Point Art Walk

South Shore Natural Science Center

Huntington Theater

Huntington Theater - She Loves Me

Gabrielle Schaffner

Linda Huey

Avid ScriptSync

#89 Wk65 Editing

I'm discontinuing posting on the Blogger site. It's just a duplicate of the Libsyn site and that seems to have the most traffic. I'll leave a note with a link to the Libsyn site.

I lost data because of a damaged drive, which I hadn't backed up. Don't do this at home okay?

At the same time I was digesting this trauma I was conflicted over which camera I should use which CDIA loans out. You can try to follow my various colliding trains of thought that led to the ultimate decision. I did decide, but the real issue isn't the camera, so much as it is trying to grasp the phantom of security when it comes to assuring I will always have a camera to shoot with when I need it.

It appears that getting comfortable with insecurity is the lesson of the week.

Just to make sure I learned my lesson I had to shoot an open house at Birch Mountain Pottery and I hoped to interview some of the customers. It makes my stomach ache to have to ask complete strangers to sign a release form and talk to me on camera. I managed to walk through that fire, thanks to Susan, her family and everyone who attended. I don't see the fizzy feeling is going to go away over time. Man up, right?

#84 Wk62 Shooting

The week before I took off for Vegas and NAB, I got in some shooting, in particular on my documentary.

I began my film project by shooting two interviews, one at the Wesleyan Potters, a craft coop and the other of a professional potter at Birch Mountain Pottery.

Both shoots gave me trouble with the lighting, but overall I got a lot of good footage and excellent sound bites.

I also dedicated my weekend to handling the lighting on a classmates film, John.

#81 Wk61 Shooting

Lots of episodes this week and not a lot of time to write notes.

In this show I run down the film project status of each person in class. I also managed to get in two days of shooting for my own film and I try to describe the lighting work I did over the weekend for John's film.