documentary – Sidewalk Face

Art, Creative Process, Documentary Editing

My Cool Friend

February 15, 2022by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl16 Comments

I work a lot with the documentary filmmaker, Mary Trunk. She is one of the coolest people I know because she has never stopped giving priority to her creative interests. She makes art every day, drawings, photos or digital images. She has produced and directed four independent feature documentaries, numerous short films, and she nurtures new talent as a film professor at Mount Saint Mary’s University Film Department.

Prior to all those accomplishments she had her own dance company in San Francisco called The Trunk Company. This was just before Silicon Valley ate the Bay Area Bohemian scene for lunch. Coincidentally, we both lived there but didn’t know each other. I went to a ton of dance concerts back then and almost for sure saw her perform. Oh, what I would give to be able to go back in time, see our crossing paths and hear a voice say, See that women? She is going to change your life.

Her documentary process is unusual. She films for a long time, three years for her first film, two for second, seven for her third and six for her most recent. That’s 18 years of filming! She doesn’t film every day or even every week, but she is tracking her subjects over a longer period of time than most documentary films do. I’ve only met a few people as committed to a vision as she is. It’s not that she comes off ultra-intense, it’s more just her nature. She doesn’t get bored or tired. She likes to go very, very deep. The stuff that is interesting to her doesn’t come right away and she is fine with waiting.

I edited her last three feature documentaries, and most of her other projects, since we started working together back around 2007. I am extremely lucky my sensibilities harmonize with her vision. We collaborate well and really enjoy each other. It’s been a truly life altering creative relationship.

Thanks to her, I have made the best thing I think I’ve ever made. Or I should say I’ve edited the best thing I have ever had the privilege of editing. We did it together. I didn’t do it. But for my contribution, it’s the best I’ve done. I am so grateful to have been part of it and so excited to share it!

Her latest feature documentary, Muscle Memory, is premiering at the Fargo Film Festival in March. I am so excited to go and see it in a theater with an actual audience.

Muscle Memory looks at the power of first obsessions to haunt the totality of our lives. The film follows eight former college dance majors over six years. Together again after several decades, the dancers use the language of movement to convey the emotional terrain of remembering.

Here are a few of the comments we have received:

A nuanced meditation on being an artist and the connections formed in the optimistic crucible of youthful creative expression.

Muscle Memory transcends documentary conventions, “documenting” the past but acting and feeling and testifying more like a work of art than a work of documentation.

This film is not just about dance. It’s about the choices we make.

It felt very personal to me even though it wasn’t my story.

It brought up so much of what’s inside, most spiritual thing I have ever seen.

Mary and I edited the film over five years, not continuously, but regularly. We knew it was a complex film and would take us a while to discover and choose which connections to make, which dances to pair with which stories, how to go back and forth in time, how to track each character over their 30-year journey.

Mary wanted the film to be dynamic and gave me permission (and the footage) to make it dance. She was ruthless, in her diplomatic way, about removing anything boring and anything she found aesthetically underwhelming. Sometimes I would push back because I had worked so hard on a scene but as I gained some distance from the editing, I’d realize she was right. That’s actually quite comforting, to trust your collaborator’s instincts. She gave me permission to go wild and she helped me rein it in. The result is something that pushes the boundaries but also has boundaries.

I think it’s fair to say we both didn’t want it to end. Yet we did want to share it with the world. I am very proud of this movie; it moves like a freight train on the wings of a butterfly. Don’t know what that means? Check it out! I will let you know when additional screening opportunities become available and the film moves into wide release.

Art, Creative Process, Documentary Editing

Praise For Non Directed Intelligence

December 18, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl8 Comments

We encounter most creative endeavors when they are complete. It seems to be the default to imagine that they were conceived exactly as we see them but as an idea rather than a thing. For some reason people seem to think that thinking is how you get things done. You have an idea; you think about it and then you execute it. All the choices were made in the thinking. Thinking is the most important thing. Thinking is equivalent to intelligence. Thinking is the master.

But really, it’s nothing like this at all. Thinking is at best a tool in the hands of a mysterious master whose methods are almost magical.

To be clear, I do not believe in magic. I use the term in a poetic way. Magic conveys an ability to get results from a process that is not articulable. At least not at the beginning. Once it’s all done you can articulate or recite what happened, but you can’t make up that list in your head before you’ve started. You can try but it won’t work. Or it won’t work as anticipated. Something will go wrong. Wrong is too negative, something will just go different. And how the person or team responds to that is likely to be more influential on the outcome than the original vision.

Perhaps I think about this so often because I am a documentary editor. I am given something and told to make sense of it. It’s like doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with no cover art to reference. It could seem that my profession flavors my other art, but I think, it’s the opposite, I came to it because I have an innate editing sensibility. I like to respond more than I like to construct. That’s what the face making is all about. I see something and respond to it. I have not made a single face that originated in my head first.

My abstracts are similar. I put a few marks on the page and everything else flows out of the choice. I usually try to make that choice as surprising to myself as possible so that I will be forced to really respond and not do an action that I have done before. I like art to be an adventure.

Some things, however, necessitate planning and careful execution, like building a house. What I am talking about doesn’t come into play during the construction of the building, planks do need to be measured and cut precisely. But what about the initial imagining of the house? You don’t measure your way into something novel, something never before seen, something special, precious, unique and surprising. You don’t tell your brain to just think it up. You have an impulse that you follow, like tracking an animal through the forest. You read the signs, you grow excited, you feel tense, you wonder if what you are hearing and sensing is real. Are you on a path or are you making a path with your constant trampling back and forth?

My brother texted me recently about a dream he had. He told me about it because he couldn’t believe his unconscious brain could author such a sophisticated story.

That’s not thinking but it is intelligence. It’s not consciously directed but it is available.

Use it.

Creative Process, Documentary Editing

Knitting a Digital Sweater

October 14, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl12 Comments

I mostly write about my art practice and day to day observations. I never write about my job, the activity that takes up one third of my life. I have a great job and that might be why I don’t write about it. Stuff you love isn’t funny and I don’t want to jinx anything. The less said the better. Until now. I want to share a few projects with you, and it would be weird to do that if you don’t even know what I do.

I am a documentary editor. I sit at my computer all day and make magic. It’s really satisfying and totally terrifying. Here’s how it works.

A certain type of person (a director) will drive to my home office with a big pile of digital footage and leave it here. Let’s pretend its yarn. They say, I got this box of yarn on Saturday, that box on Sunday. Please make me a sweater.

I’ll ask, who’s the sweater for? What kind of weather will they be in?

I get the answers and start the process.

At first, I just look at all the yarn and see what I have. You need to know what the options are. You can’t make a thin sweater from thick yarn. Then I re-organize the yarn because who cares when or where it was bought? I label it by color, thickness, material and most importantly by awesomeness. My preference is to use all the awesome yarn. I usually construct my sweater design around the most awesome yarn.

What happens next is I knit something, show the director, gets a bunch of notes on how to make it more the way they want it and fix the sweater. We do this a few times and then upload the sweater to the internet and let people start virtually wearing it.

Our hope is that people feel something when they wear the sweater. I specialize in knitting emotionally provocative, one-of-a-kind sweaters. Sweaters that make you want to be a better person. Sweaters that make you want to change the world. Sweaters that take your breath away. Sweaters that dance. So many special sweaters. I can’t make them without very special yarn and the people who know how to get it.

My skill in life is to be able to make sweaters without patterns. Even more importantly, to make sweaters that make people feel things.

I will be sharing some of these things with you soon! Check back in if you think you might like to wear one of my virtual sweaters for a few minutes.