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People of Midtown was started by Jasmine and Daniel. It's a freeform blog, expect posts about pretty much anything, from hipster trends and fixies to songs and death.
We are always accepting submissions at: peopleofmidtown@tumblr.com.
Jasmine is a recording artist living in Sacramento
Daniel is a wire artist/filmmaker living in San Francisco
During the summer of 2009, I began working at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, as a High School Explainer. At the same time, the Sacramento Film and Music Festival’s 10x10 Filmmaker’s Challenge was about to begin. The 10x10 Filmmaker’s challenge is a yearly event that was started in 2004. Every year, filmmakers meet at a predetermined location and receive a theme as well as props and/or visual elements to include in the film. They are given 10 days to complete their film, which must be 10 minutes or less (thus the name 10x10).
This year, I decided to enter the 6th annual 10x10 Filmmaker’s Challenge. The theme for the 2009 challenge was “Milestones and Markers”. After receiving the theme and prop, I began thinking about what kind of film to make. Eventually, after wracking my brain for two days and losing valuable time, I decided that the film was going to be a documentary about the Exploratorium’s High School Explainer program. One thing I didn’t know going into the project though, is that making a documentary in ten days is EXTREMELY HARD.
First, I’ll fill you in on what High School Explainers do. We are in charge of opening and closing the museum, interpreting exhibits for visitors, finding lost kids, acting as the eyes and ears of the museum, and performing various demonstrations, such as cow’s eye dissections and magic.
After initially taking up the filmmaking project, I finally began filming eight days before the film was due. On the first day, I filmed filler shots of the explainers at work and cow’s eye dissections. Being inexperienced at interviewing, I started asking people questions off the top of my head. I quickly realized that this was a bad way to do it after failing at the first interview. Deciding that I didn’t want half-baked, impromptu interviews, I began planning which questions i would ask, with help from other explainers.
Once I had about eight questions, such as: “How has the exploratorium affected or influenced you?” and “What is it like being a new explainer?”. I went at it, recruiting interviewees. On the second day, I was lent a second camera. I immediately began filming “real” interviews. On the third day, I had a full on two-person crew (including me) filming and conducting interviews. On the fourth day, I filmed the final interviews and gathered more filler shots. Over the course of just four days of filming, I ended up with more than six hundred video clips.
Then came the editing.
Originally- I planned to use iMovie, the video editor built in to every Mac. Since I had just upgraded to the latest version, I thought this would be no problem. I was wrong. So. horribly. wrong. Since I was used to the (much better) timeline-based editing system (that iMovie somehow lacks), I couldn’t use it. I had just four days left to finish the film.
I needed a real video editing program. Being so short on time, I was desperate. I tried looking for a free alternative program. Finding none and becoming increasingly desperate, I downloaded a free trial of AVID, a widely-used program. Unfortunately, because I had never used it before, AVID was useless to me. I had less than 96 hours to have the film, edited, burned to DVD and placed in the hands of festival officials who were more than 100 miles away (in Sacramento)….
Story continued tomorrow.
-DS
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