Sunlight, Apple™, and the Joys of Post-Production

[Here Comes the Sun | Final Cut | Reflections on My Time As a Yorkshire Pilgrim | The Process | Thank You, Steve | Strategy | More Black Magic]

Of all the natural phenomena I’ve had to readjust to this past week — has it only been a week? — anything having to do with the sun takes the cake. First of all, there’s its presence: the mere fact that I see it from time to time distinguishes this part of the world from the British Isles, as does its power to transform my little Honda Civic from charming automobile to furnace deathtrap. (I’m still getting used to the idea that I won’t be able to touch the steering wheel for about five minutes until the car cools off — quite a feat, considering this means I have to drive with only my fingertips.) There’s also the shortness of the days, as compared to what I experienced in the higher latitudes. I don’t really recall seeing much nighttime in Dublin; I was usually back at the apartment by the time it got full dark, and the sun was up when I woke, even on the earliest days. America actually honors that period of the day known as evening, which has been refreshing.

With the natural world out of the way, let’s turn to man-made wonders: namely, Final Cut Express, which I’m using to put together the documentary. I have some experience with the program from the Carolina Letters project we launched for the university. Most of that work was audio, although I did make a DVD for one of the lectures, and plan to do another of the same kind in the fall. So I’ve had a good time fiddling around with the various video options in the program, getting to know its odds and ends, and so far I’ve made some good progress.

My pilot project was my sixth tape, which has all my footage of the Yorkshire Dales. I wanted to go back to this one first because it was the first point on the trip in which the landscape really had me reeling — the hilliness of the Isle of Man and York’s ancient Roman walls had certainly caught my fancy, but in Yorkshire, I found myself actually slack-jawed at the landscape. I stayed in Thorpe, a “village” of six houses clustered around a triangle of grass that vaguely constituted a roundabout; I spent my days there hiking the nearby moors, taking perhaps too much footage of the sheep, and marveling at the endless swells of green hills that rose one from the other, like a still life of sea-green breakers.

Working with these shots has taken me back to what it felt like to be out on the road. It all feels so long ago, even though Dublin is less than a week behind me — my hometown in the U.S. has familiarity on its side, and the shock of return was enough to bring it all blasting back. After only days here, I feel as though I never left, and I have only these breathtaking images to remind me that not so very long ago, I was traipsing around on haunted grounds, wearing my battered hiking boots and probably the same shirt I’d had on since last Tuesday. Nostalgia doesn’t begin to describe it.

Here’s how the project goes: I hook the camera (loaded with the proper tape) up to the computer, and Final Cut “captures” all the footage from the tape and puts it into a program that allows me to cut it, shape it, and move it around. The software captures it at speed, so essentially, I press play on the camera’s VCR, “capture” on the computer, and go take a shower while the thing plugs away for an hour, moving the footage from one device to the other. Because Steve Jobs is a genius (Fortune has apparently named him one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs, but let’s face it — I like iPods, and chances are, you do too), the video is just as sharp and clear on the computer as it is on the camera, and I go about my merry business of cutting and pasting, snipping, rendering, and generally doing all that needs to be done to stitch something whole and compelling out of the scraps of information I spent this summer collecting. Luckily, the Final Cut interface — like most Apple products — is almost suspiciously intuitive. Although it will probably take more than a few weeks of fulling for me to fully grasp its potential as an editing suite, what knowledge I have for now will serve, and I’m looking forward both to making some good progress and also learning more about the system, and all the tricks I can pull with it.

I’ve been considering entry strategies for the project, because at this point, I have a great deal of footage to sort through and process, not merely computer-wise, but mentally. I plan to focus on the interviews, so I can take stock of the talking heads I’ve gotten; these opinions, after all, will be an integral part of the documentary’s narrative, and I want to give them the proper attention. Most of the B-roll I took will have voice-overs rather than audio, so I feel I can leave that floating for the time being while I take a closer look at the interviews. That’s not to say I don’t have some stunning B-roll, though, and I’d be happy to post some if it didn’t take up a bazillion megabytes of space per minute on the computer’s hard disk.

I brought Black Magic out of retirement for a brief tour of Atlanta today. Sarah, my younger sister, has just wrapped up a four-week acting camp at Georgia’s famous Shakespeare Tavern (you don’t have to live in Atlanta to appreciate the playhouse’s logo, which is just fantastic). She had Bottom’s part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I thought it might be neat if I could tape it. Aside from the washout of red light that I wasn’t able to fix for a good bit of the time, and — one of my big pet peeves — the baby that materialized in my row during the second act, and would not stop making baby noises during big pauses, it went well. It was interesting to work with moving targets for a change; kept me on my toes, and my finger on the focus ring. The excitement of camera work hasn’t diminished a bit since I got started.