brother’s sister
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007nice to do some meaningful work! i spent most of the past 24 hours editing a documentary film with my media partner. she had worked the film out on paper, and cut everything to a timeline in premierre, then we sat together to clean up the edit. it was three hours of raw material, what needed to fit into 30 minutes movie!
we sorted the first half yesterday, drinking 32 year old pu’er tea and working until after midnight. then the guard at her dorm called up to say, ‘’the man must go”. she covered my cab home, and i wandered to the congee shop for some late dinner. congee is like rice pudding, i take mine with beef strips and shalot onions, salty, but you can get it with kalamaris or cow and swine innards, if you like. after midnight on the streets of my neighborhood the scene is so tranquil, the congee shop full of off-hours workers, occasional couples out late, and more rarely the foreign freak.
back up my eight fleights of stairs, i fell into bed, crashed and slept soundly almost five hours. rising with assam tea, i had to sew up a seam in my purple pants, grab a shower and run, stopping at the bakery for some sweetbreads. up to the campus and back in xiashus room, i was at the edit machine at 8:00. we powered untill 4. the edit went smoothely, except in a couple places, where they were speaking chinese and i couldnt follow, so i just cut it visually and it didnt really work, my partner will have to deal with that later.
i took a short break, crashed out on the bed while she went further. i floated in and out of a lazy over-concentrated green tea sleep, my mind full of these images of yunnnan. she woke me with a lovely song, her own voice, recorded the other day. that she shared such an intimate recording, her voice, captured, to call me back form sleep was touching. i will never forget those moments, drifting back to the waking world, visions of yunnan in my mind, and xiashu there, singing. =)
another catnap, and i remember mumbling, ‘i want to go home’ and xiashu asked me, ‘and where is your home?’ strangely enough, i got the feeling that she understands, i dont have a home. but then, there, i was quite at home, working with her on an important project, one with some meaning. the material is totally interesting, centering around a girl and boy, immigrant children living in lijiang, yunnan. much of the footage is shot with them in their school their home, and it is an intimate portrayal of these kids’ life, from dawn till dusk.
finishing up the edits, the piece turned out to be 43 minutes, but i was so much into the material in the form that she had worked out, i couldnt reduce it to the required 30, so we went with it as is. she took it down to our super and i think it went well, as they watched the whole 43 minute thing together with some others. that our super didnt need to skip forward says something, it must be a continuous and engaging enough piece. although there was some criticism of the edit in a few details, i think she liked it. i waited out back of the school, fighting off mosquitoes. i met up xiashu an hour later, and we grabbed some dinner at the market behind the university. i know it is her project, her thesis in fact, but i was so interested to hear our supervisor’s feedback, i felt like a little kid.
i imagine the work has my fingerprints all over it and we might hear something about that. there is a reason our super hired me to do some work for her, she likes my style, and can likely recognize my handiwork. i half expect her to come chiding me for devoting to xiashu, time i might better spend on her own projects! but that might even be funny. i didnt do this marathon edit because of the girl, or because of our supervisor, i did it because there is a story there to tell, and that, is what post production specialist is all about.
its so amazing, just how much i learned from that mad irishman in berlin, now i come out here and can get busy cutting films. somewhere along the line i became a competent editor, a professional, even, and i hope, in some small way, i make my teacher proud. you should know, paul, so much of my edit talent is informed by what i picked up from you. respect.