That's what the Apple trainer said last night at the "one-to-one" class (you can sign up for these when you buy a Mac computer) about my film: awesome!
This guy is a filmmaker himself, and I love how people get all happy when other people do what they love to do too. Isn't that a wonderful phenomenon? --instead of getting protective and competitive, the response is to welcome and share the thing you love. (Funny how that doesn't apply to everything we love, ...or we think we love.)
Anyway, it's so great to get encouragement.
I take into account he had spent all day showing people how to set up e-mail accounts on their Macs, and then I come in with my raw footage for editing help; but I still take it as a valid judgment, because, in fact, the film does look pretty awesome, seen by strangers out in public--a dancing Fly, murder in a bathtub, sinking newspaper boats...
He gave me a whole bunch of editing tips, and maybe the most encouraging one was the reassurance that feeling overwhelmed is not a sign that I'm doing anything fundamentally wrong, the task truly is enormous:
Video footage is 30 frames per second, and I've got... say, 4 hours of film.
That's 60 seconds x 4 hours = 240 sec. x 30 frames = 7200 still photos to juggle in your brain.
(And I say I can't do math!)
He said he uses two big monitors to edit, so it's not all cramped upon a laptop. You can get monitors cheap, so I'll think about that. Maybe for the next film.
He also told me the name for special effects you create with the camera, which I like so much, (for instance, I had filmed a stormy sky and wanted help superimposing that shot, semi-opaque, over a scene of the sinking boat):
"practical effects".
As opposed to CGI (computer generated images) special effects.
This morning I'm heading off to sacrifice Iphigenia. It's been raining all night and the sky is thick, which should be just right. My only worry is directing a nine-year-old whom I don't really know.
Unless I have to reshoot something, this really is the last shoot. I'm so glad I started this last year. It really is the most interesting thing I've done in years--and the most challenging.
Something in my cellular memory gut tells me this is exactly the kind of heavy dull weather they were having in Aulis or where ever the Hades it was that Agamemnon's fleet was to embark from...and what the conditions were like when Iphigenia was murdered. (That was a cumbersome sentence!) Grrrl, you get more impressive with all this--inner workings of your person, blogging, higher math applications and all the rest. From my past and varied experience with folks of all ages, your work with the nine year old will probably be the most delightful and fluid--(not to romanticize childhood, but, unless he/she is precociously jaded, this actor may be your least self-censoring and uninhibited...) Have fun and I hope you're able to work with the weather, but differently from how Agamemnon did! (JEEZ...another awful sentence! My brain's still fuzzy from it's pre-verbal dream-state. We're off to Powderhorn!
ReplyDeleteLove and All the Arts!
Stefalala
I'm so looking forward to your flick! Break a leg today!
ReplyDeleteYes, Stef, the weather did turn out to be perfect: The rain let up and left a heavy air, perfect for sacrifice.... Thanks for the thoughts.
ReplyDeleteAnd Nancy, I'm looking forward to seeing it too. Sheesh, I just need to put it all together--that's the hardest part of all!