When we started shooting video footage for my Sea Level installation, a major worry in my mind was the time it would take to edit. I knew we only needed about four minutes to accompany the excerpt I selected, but anyone who’s ever worked with video can tell you that sometimes it takes hours of footage to get four good ones that actually get seen outside the editing room.
Heather and I worked on choosing footage and editing scenes together, in part because she volunteered her computer that had room for both software and gobs of footage. That meant a few late nights spent with frozen pizza and cheap wine as we marathoned our way through editing.
Of course, it’s always in the late stages of the game that you discover a task you just can’t figure out how to complete. The image below is from my apartment at about 10 at night, when I had to look up a YouTube tutorial to remember how to fade sound in and out of the video. Once you know the steps, it’s as easy as driving a car. But there’s always a moment of panic when you realize you don’t know how to do that one. simple. step.
As I write this blog post, the video is complete, and a broadside of the narrated excerpt is at the printers’. I can’t wait to share my work at our show in just a few days, especially since I broke out of the literary box of simply doing a reading and transformed a bit of my work into a new, engaging format.
