Collaborating

The aforementioned Mr. Rosenbush is a sterling gentleman of considerable gifts. We have known each other for just over twenty years now, and we've been collaborating on writing projects for almost half that time. Video editing of the Alien project is the most recent of these projects, and yesterday we met up to work on one of the short pieces. The project, I should mention, is aimed at creating very, very short video and/or film pieces to be downloaded to cellphones or viewed on the web, or for similar uses. The ones we really like we might submit to short-film festivals, and there are a couple other ideas we've come up with that I can't really talk about just yet.

The trouble with our latest project was, when we shot we didn't really have a story laid out, we just kinda figured we'd start with a few shots that Marc already had in mind and then wing it from there. This had the inevitable result: I put together a rough cut, we hacked it into some kind of sense several days ago, and soon realized that there were things missing. This means reshoots, which in this case isn't such a big deal because shooting on video against a backdrop in Ezra's apartment isn't very expensive at all.

And yet we still did a couple hours' work on the footage, which came as a bit of a surprise. But Marc has done this more than I have, and he was quite right: even with missing footage, there are still things to be done. Moving this here, that over there, inserting a placeholder like "insert: victory dance" to mark where the new footage will go, etc. The value of a placeholder is that, with a decent guess as to how long the new footage should be, you can still get a here-and-now idea of how the music and sound effects are timing out.

The fun bit is that iMovie isn't very complicated, so Marc has been learning how to use it by watching me, so now his natural I'm-in-charge directorial instincts are starting to take over, leading to comical fights over who is in command of the trackball and keyboard. When he edited Zen Noir he rarely tried to take over the cutter's chair from the editor, Camden Toy, because they were using Avid and it's fiendishly complicated and, really, he just didn't want to know. But we're planning to get Final Cut Pro in a week or two, and that should cure his trackball obsession.

Well, actually, no it won't, 'cause I'll be learning it almost in real time as we work, which means he'll be learning it too, and--ah, heck. So much for that idea.