More Thoughts from the Editing Suite

[Progress Report | Flora and Fauna | Spotty Camera Work | That One Story about a Dead Bug, Which Died on My Lens in Troller's Gill, and Which I Mistook for a Chip or Flaw That Might Cost Serious Money to Fix]

Today was business as usual with the documentary. I loaded three more hours of footage onto the hard disk, mostly chronologically — the tape from Peel Town, and two tapes from York and the surrounding countryside. This means I’ve put a sizable dent in that stage of the project, which makes me happy.

Once I have a new reel, I usually watch it straight through and find all the clips I might use for the documentary. A useful clip might be something half an hour long, like some of my interviews. It might be just a few seconds — the shadow of a cloud rolling across a hill, a sheep that decides to come up and nuzzle the camera lens (you laugh, but it will be in the credits). It might be a truly epic pan across wild English countryside, or a brief shot — taken from a respectful distance — of one of the man-eating thistles I found on the Dales, which looked more than capable of shredding me if I looked at it the wrong way. Anyway, this is far too much detail. But hopefully it’ll give a sense of what kinds of things I’m looking for as I start putting the project together.

It’s difficult to point out any major revelations about film work I haven’t already shared, but I will say this: doing anything with a lens (and, thanks to whoever helped me assemble my kit, no lens cap) is nothing short of an adventure. I came back to my footage from the Isle of Man today only to find that a hair had somehow found its way onto the lens of the camera, and — being the novice I was at that time — I blithely went halfway across the island shooting film with somebody’s hair floating just left of center in every frame. (I say “somebody’s hair” because it’s curly, and it looks blond. How that might have gotten there, I cannot begin to guess.)

Luckily, there’s plenty one can do about this. For one thing, stray particles on a lens only appear when the lens is focused in a certain way. Zoom in beyond 20x or so (the lens on Black Magic will magnify things a whopping 99 times), and your little problem, be it a hair or a drop of rainwater, will phase out of being, as though by magic. So take a good look when the final production gets screened, but with any luck, we won’t be seeing much of that hair, curly and luminous though it is.

Of all the problems you can have with a lens, suicidal insects are probably the most bothersome, not to mention the most perplexing. Idiot that I am, I decided I would take a twilight trek through Troller’s Gill, a limestone gorge where a Black Dog with a particularly ferocious streak has been known to stretch its legs after the sun goes down. (I had been there before during the day, and the sight of the caves boring into the earth — left behind from the old lead mining days — were enough to ignite a spark of panic in me, even at three in the afternoon.) The place was crawling with midges after dark, all of them floating in big clouds right at head level. I couldn’t walk ten paces without becoming a temporary guest of these little evening celebrations, and it was pretty near impossible to get anything productive done. But I dutifully trooped down the path, setting up the tripod here and there and taking footage of the darkening hills. I finally withdrew from the place when the light got too low for practical filming; apparently the local midge government had somehow gotten wind of my presence, because I couldn’t go anywhere without a thousand-man escort hovering around my ears and face.

The next morning, I found a spot on Black Magic’s lens. That’s not quite true: it was actually during an interview that I discovered said spot, which rendered all the video I got for that segment completely useless, although it’s not really vital for the final production. It looked like a drop of water, and like any other spot, it would vanish after I zoomed in past a certain point. But it was really getting on my nerves, and when I checked the next day to find it hadn’t dried up and moved on the way I had expected, I got a little worried. I borrowed a soft cloth from my hosts and made a few exploratory rubs, and found that it had texture, which set off alarm bells in my head. It seemed likely that the lens had gotten chipped somehow. I didn’t know how or where this might have happened — I wasn’t even sure that lenses could chip, since I’d never encountered such a thing before. But I sat there on the corner of the bed, a hundred awful thoughts running through my mind (could it have brushed a tree branch or something?), and then I noticed that I’d managed to smear it. A few more minutes of careful polishing got rid of the spot, and I finally came to the conclusion that I had just rubbed away the final remains of a midge who had danced his last little bug bolero on the clear dance floor of my Leica lens.

So in short, the project’s rolling along fine. Compared to all that nonsense, looking at footage in the comfort of my air conditioned (and relatively bugless) computer room has been a piece of cake.