Haas Presentation

This Friday I will be presenting my progress report to the other scholars, Leah and my mentor Katherine Sherwood. I will stand in front of my cohort for twenty minutes and attempt to compress five months of research into ten slides and a dozen concise points.

I started having nightmares last week. At least fear is a good motivating force,  I stuck my head down and have been pretty much hibernating since. Regardless of the fact that it is Halloween, the weekend has been spent editing an introduction to my film and a few excerpts. It's slightly odd and disorienting that forty hours of work breaks down to less than five minutes of video, still, each time I watch the time line I feel giddy and so happy to see my vision coming alive.

As the minutes fade to hours  and I focus on a 17 inch monitor  and not the Giants game I have to remind myself to recite my fathers favorite mantra; "There can be no art without discipline, and there can be no discipline without sacrifice".
On that note I'm back to the grind, Go Giants and Happy Halloween.

In My Editing Cave

The last week has been spent compressing all of my footage from Ireland. What would normally be a tedious, repetitive and timely endeavor was instead infused with a lot of laughter and reminiscing. Thanks go entirely to Raul Varela, my DP for transforming the process by sharing the burden of compressing and file renaming and by lightening the load by making me laugh.

Truly I am so happy with the beautiful imagery and scenes we captured and again I was touched by the raw beauty of these women's stories. A grand 28 of them! My real duty will be to do the stories and history justice. Being a young filmmaker, in both experience and less so in age, that will be where I will need to remind myself at every turn to ask for guidance and to stay open to letting grace into the process. I feel fortunate that the lessons I've learned with painting and writing can be applied to editing. These being to
1. Trust the process
2. To have faith in the vision of what I am creating
3. To do a little every day
4. Be easy on myself and not too critical of the work
Lastly I think it's really important to enjoy the process to the best of ones ability, and to remind oneself of the original intention.

To keep the process of blogging alive and vibrant for me and also for anyone who might read this,  I will start sharing my thoughts and images on the topic or section of the documentary that I am currently editing.
These posts will come in weekly and will feature links to other sites that talk about the subject I'm exploring.

Let me know your thoughts!