One of the reactions to George Floyd being choked for 8 minutes and 46 seconds by a former police officer kneeling on his neck,
was a national call for submissions to The Breath Project. The organizers encouraged spoken word artists to record an 8 minute and 46 second performance to be used as a tool for education and activism purposes.
Normally, I would’ve jumped at writing and rehearsing a performance piece. Yet, these days, I’m far more interested in being behind the camera. Since my roommate constantly breaks out into original protest songs and political rants, I challenged her to perform for this project.
Once she was ready, I contacted the local participating theatre, Rude Mechs, which volunteered its space, The Crashbox, where we filmed her performance. A Rude Mechs staffer scheduled our shoot, set the lights and, using my smartphone, shot her performance while I directed.
The shoot only took about an hour. She ran through it several times while he shot it from two different camera angles.
Although we filmed on a Wednesday, I didn’t view the clips until Friday around midnight while lying in bed. I saved myself some grief by deleting unusable footage such as when she had the script in hand.
Then, I watched several YouTube videos about editing with iMovie. I normally wait until the weekend to venture into a new technology because I know the first day will be agonizing. This time around, I found a better approach. By watching a slew videos the night before, I woke up excited about diving into iMovie with a game plan–after yoga and lunch.
Of course, confident plans merely tempt the devil. Straight out of the gates, I clicked the wrong thing and imported many pictures from my photo album along with the video clips I wanted. Rookie mistake. No problem.
Once I got the clips I wanted, the easiest approach was to merge two of them, which wasn’t as straight forward as merging two audio clips with GarageBand, but I understood the process. Again, the devil found an opening.
Despite the confirmation that the merged file had been saved, the clip description showed “zero bytes.” Not believing what I read, I still clicked on it. Sure enough, nothing was there.
Back to Google, my favorite IT entity. I learned that zero bytes meant there wasn’t enough room to save a file. I’d greatly underestimated how much space a less than 10-minute clip consumed. So, I saved it to the infamous Cloud. Again, I got the message that the file had been successfully saved, but when I checked iCloud, it showed zero bytes.
At that point, I took a bathroom break. When I returned, the file actually had a much higher number than zero. A-ha! So, there’s a lag between the file being successfully saved and having it show up.
Then, I was on my happy editing way. I worked on a script page a day because after an hour, apathy creeped in. Once I finished the rough cut, I saved the file again without any devilish drama.
Yet, for all the effort, our video was around two minutes short of the required length. Stretching it was out of the question. Nor was I interested in returning to the theatre to record more.
As a matter of fact, with the exception of the time limit, her performance was solid and I liked the editing choices I’d made. All I needed to do was make some fine tune edits, learn how to create end credits, and how to upload to Vimeo.
And not a moment too soon. I’ve got a screenplay to revamp and a film festival to screen. Plus I need to plan out the second season of my podcast. Then there’s the seemingly never-ending illustrations that I need to finish for my third book.
Yet, all’s not lost. Once I uploaded the video to Vimeo, I shared it with several friends and family. Then, I took the extraordinary step of entering it into three film festivals.
View the completed project on Vimeo.