Second Semester
Well, I haven’t been very diligent about blogging this semester but I have a good excuse: I’m in the final week of post-production on my hour-length documentary! It has absolutely taken over my life and the life of my selfless collaborator, Emmanuel. We’ve been editing, re-editing, sound designing, and test screening, everything but getting lots of sleep and taking weekends off.
Dan Olmstead, our second semester sound teacher, has been such a great resource for sound design. I am so blessed that he has offered to mix the doc in Stage 2, our classroom/classy mixing stage. So this coming Friday the 13th, armed with snacks and coffee, Dan and my class are going to do a full-out mix into the wee hours if necessary. Really, that is going to be an extraordinary experience and is a wonderful gift from Dan and BDFI.
Sound design and finishing my doc have enabled me to coerce several of my classmates into taking on roles in my project. Joel, Nick, and Marlenée have been helping with sound, and Franco has been doing the graphic animations for the piece. It has made me feel much more supported and challenged to have a bigger team on board.
Another surprisingly rewarding process was the test-screening experience. For a few weeks, Emmanuel and I sat with many of our peers and watched the documentary, noticing every flicker of their eyes away from the screen, the things they laughed at, what they thought didn’t make sense, what was interesting. Then we’d scramble to make the changes that we had seen necessary as a result of borrowing a fresh pair of eyes and try it out again on another unsuspecting pair. I was surprised to find that I did not struggle with accepting criticism, it was always contextualized nicely by those who gave it, and deep down I was always critical of the same things. Having my own criticisms articulated by someone else enabled me to summon the energy and creative brainpower to recut, change again and again, and most importantly, rethink almost every single clip in the documentary in at least some minute way. I was impressed by the level of the criticism as well.
In the coming week, I will complete this doc that has been haunting me/gracing me with its presence (depending on the day) for most of a year now, I’ll send it off to several Canadian film festivals, and I’ll be able to start something new. Well, maybe not right away. Maybe I’ll just take a few days to go to the beach.
