editing – 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.

Culture, Relationships, Technology

The Medium is The Message

January 12, 2022by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl6 Comments

This is the title (or nearly the title) of a book published in 1967 by Marshall McLuhan. Until a few days ago I had never physically handled the book. More on that in a minute. I learned of its existence so long ago that I cannot remember when I didn’t know of it. As I got a bachelor’s degree in communications, it’s very possible that department first brought it to my attention, along with a bunch of other stuff I couldn’t recall if my life depended on it.

My husband reminded me that Marshall McLuhan, the actual human being, bereted a pontificating professor in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall. I might have learned of it from that. I was never curious to read it assuming it’s too academic. The title has been sufficient. I have pondered the phrase for years and find it to be meaningful.

To me, the phrase means the technology you use determines how you will communicate. The how then effects the what. How you communicate effects what you communicate.

TEXTING

My speech patterns and what I will say are very different in text, email, over the phone, on zoom or in person. Texting is the most radical. Like others, I abbreviate words. Not because I don’t appreciate the value of grammar, but because the keyboard is so small, and the bursts of communication are coming too fast. If I don’t abbreviate, the back and forth can’t happen at the proper speed. There is a difference between a brief and logistical text exchange, like “get butter” and a five-minute parlay. With that, there is a form of bonding I have not experienced in any other medium. Multiple topics going at once, a sense that you and the other texter really get each other. Emoji and gifs in addition to words. I’m not saying it’s superior, but I am saying it is unique. It allows for a burst of intimacy that can bypass some of the more anxiety producing aspects of in person intimacy.

That’s the message of the medium. The message is what that medium can do that nothing else can. It’s not a replacement, it’s an addition.

YOUTUBE COMMENTARY VIDEOS

My kid shows me some of the YouTube commentary videos they watch. So fascinating. In this case, YouTube is the medium, a sub medium of video. I am interested on two levels, as a direct source of insight into youth culture and as an editor. I thought I had seen it all, but I haven’t, not by a long shot. The editing style has a different grammar, it’s extremely lean, all dead air removed, maybe even a little of the air that wasn’t dead. The medium knows it is fighting for attention and it doesn’t ever provide space for reflection. I often have to tell my kid to pause just so I can laugh and not miss the next line.

These videos are sort of like clever essays delivered by charismatic but highly irreverent anchormen. In this world the news is not geo-political or important, it’s cultural and optional. They are highly constructed verbal arguments against something, usually an offensive offering like Bad Boys on TikTok. The best ones are truly brilliant. Young people have a grasp on the meta that is hard to understate and hard to articulate but very funny. Because of the digitization of everything, they have digested exponentially more content than previous generations and therefore their analysis and performed and edited presentation of that analysis is its own medium.

THE ACTUAL BOOK AS PHYSICAL OBJECT

When my kid is showing me a new video, it’s McLuhan’s book title that most often pops in my head. I feel grateful be introduced to a new medium and I try hard to decode its message. I was talking to my husband about all this, including that I had never read the book and he said, it’s right there, pointing behind me.

What?

It’s on the top of that stack behind you.

Right here, under the art supplies?

Yes.

I’ve lived with my husband for 23 years. This book came with him. Therefore, I have lived in the same house as this book for 23 years without knowing it. I don’t know what that means, but it makes me feel really weird. This book has been in the same vicinity as art supplies I use almost every day. Not a good look for someone who takes pride in being observant. I can discern subtle changes in the pavement throughout my neighborhood, but I can’t notice the cover of a book that I’ve been thinking about for decades because when I look in its direction, instead of seeing it, I just see a blob called Husband stuff. You think you know everything about someone, and you find out you know nothing because you aren’t paying attention.

Well, despite my intentions to not read the book, I opened it up. It’s nothing like I expected! It’s mostly a picture book! McLuhan collaborated with the graphic artist Quentin Fiore. I enjoyed flipping through it. It’s humorous. It’s the YouTube commentary video of its time.

Turns out I was one-part right, one part ignorant. McLuhan wrote Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964 and the phrase first appears there. That one does seem to be more academic but it’s not in our house for me to check. My husband’s book is the The Medium is the Massage. I certainly wish that phrase were true. I would love a massage. I didn’t realize the play on words until I took the illustration photo for this post. More proof I’m not an observation savant. My husband was dumbfounded, having never noticed the wordplay. All this has got me wondering what else resides in these mysterious piles of husband stuff. Even if I look, will I see it?

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.