We’ve shot 451.44 GB of footage which translates, at 14.92 GB/98 minutes, to 49.42 hours (49:25:20 h:m:s) of footage shot. Our goal for the first month is, as Ashley mentioned, to shoot 75 hours of footage, 40 of which should be interview and 35 of which should be active. While we don’t know the breakdown of interview to active footage shot, that means that we’re 25 hours short of our goal, with 5 days remaining to meet our goal until Ashley goes home to Oregon for a few days for Christmas. That means 25 hours in 5 days, which actually should be attainable if we’re diligent: just 5 hours a day. After all, we’re at TVN from 10am to 8pm every day on average anyway, so we should be able to get there! Just need to ramp it up a little.

Our original goal for January, then, is to shoot 100 hours. To give y’all a sense of perspective, for our previous version of Life’s Waltz, we shot 28 full tapes (42 minutes each) of footage that we cut down to a 16:30 minute film, which boils down to about a 71:1 ratio of footage shot to footage included in the final product. Given we’re aiming to shoot 175 hours total (a goal that may or may not be met, of course, but we will try!) for the feature version and cut it down to, let’s say, a 90-minute film, this would yield a ratio of about 117:1! Maybe we should just stop now and save ourselves time in the editing room! No… but let’s just say that the editing process will be neither quick nor easy! “Fun” may be the word I’m looking for.

production, status update

ashley, producing, status update

Week 2 of production, here we goooooo!

Here are the latest happenings at Town Village North (TVN), the retirement community where we are filming in Dallas:

1. SAM’S BIRTHDAY! It was Sam’s 89th birthday (88th maybe?) on December 2. Happy Birthday, Sam! He had a nice party, mostly friends and family over for a Pei-Wei Buffet. As he read his cards and blew out his candles, I could tell that he was processing (almost) 90 years of memories. I can only imagine how exhilarating and overwhelming that must be!

2. ELECTIONS!!! Two of our subjects are running for Residents Council–Sam and Ed. Who will be elected? Oh, the pressure! Four in all will be elected, and these four will basically be a voice for the residents and whatever they want communicated to the TVN administration.

Voting took place 3 times today, and will continue through tomorrow. It felt like people really came out of the woodworks for their chance to vote–the main hall was really buzzing tonight as people strolled by (cane in hand) or whizzed by in their scooter.

3. POKER GAME! Today’s Men’s Poker game had an unexpected bump in the road (and at least 30 minutes into their playing time!): there was an extra 7 of Diamonds found in the deck!!! Nooo-ooo! As the cards were inspected by the men, you could have cut the tension in the room WITH A KNIFE! But once that extra 7 was tossed out, the betting continued as before.

Today’s Jeer: We found out today that (prior to our arrival) a woman whom we had hoped to chat with and tag along with at TVN has had a series of hard-hitting bouts of pneumonia. We were also informed today that her children have decided to put her into physical therapy/rehab. According to this woman’s circle of friends at TVN, sometimes the next course of action for an individual like herself is be put into nursing care. While strange and almost sad for me, this is definitely one of the realities many seniors face.

Today’s Cheer: Jared and I have accumulated quite the group of characters–there are still some, however, who we would like to involve in the project: one individual is a 107 year-old woman who is sharp as a tack and loves to dance! Secondly, there is a married couple who actually met at TVN and got married there! I can’t wait to hear about this love story!

fun, status update

production, status update

ashley, jared, production, status update

Wow. I’m so ecstatic about what’s going on – we’ve had just a couple of days of production and already so many amazing and fascinating people have entered our lives and filled our footage with their quirky personalities, honesty, interesting perspectives, and unique stories!

Let me tell you specifically. We met first with Martin, a very distinguished gentleman and multiple-honor-recipient living at Town Village North (I’ll abbreviate that to TVN, because I have the feeling I’ll be typing it quite a bit!). We stayed for just about 45 minutes. We want our first “interviews” (which is a word we’re trying to stop using), or conversations, if you will, to be brief so as not to seem needy or overwhelming. Just to break the ice, get everyone used to the equipment setup – it’s not every day that a camera and audio setup is coming through the halls of TVN. Martin told us a story about having to leave Rochester because if he didn’t, his life would be threatened due to his asthma. He came to Dallas and has been here since. As it turns out, he was the first of more than half of the people we’ve met so far who are from New York!

At any rate, we then went and visited Yael (who had forgotten we were coming to visit–whoops!). She answered the door in total surprise and laughed. After saying we could come back another time, she insisted we stay and she got ready really quickly. What should she wear? Did she look decent? Should she change sweaters? Everyone’s thinking about how they need to dress up for the camera! We keep telling everyone to not worry about it. After some time, we know that people will stop dressing up for the camera and just be natural, but it definitely makes us feel like a pretty classy enterprise! Yael was born in Cologne, Germany, and she’s lived in countries all over the world, throughout Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, and the USA. And she speaks 6 languages, including Swahili! Incredible.

Then we met Sam. You’ve seen his video. He’s a riot and, like Ashley said, was blown away by the fact that we were recording straight to digital and could store 6 hours 40 minutes of footage on one card no larger than 1″x1″ (even though we’re only using 16GB cards that hold 1 hour 40 minutes each, we could be using a 64GB card of the same physical size to achieve that feat). He hinted that he may have some romantic interests that we should press him for more information on–awesome! That sounds juicy to us! When we stopped filming, he said he had something for us. He gave us four chocolate truffles (two milk chocolate, two white chocolate) and the following:
Haha! And that was after he complimented both of our smiles! What a fun guy. We’re so excited to continue working with all of these people at TVN.

Finally, we capped off the day with my own grandmother: Dorothy. She got all dressed up too, of course, and entertained us with her own ruminations on how different youth culture and life for youngsters like us(!) is nowadays compared to when she grew up. Oh yeah, that was after she fed us! Would I be biased if I said she’s my favorite? Her friend Ceil also showed up and so we filmed a little intro for her too, which you can see below. She’s hilarious. Not afraid to say what’s on her mind, which will be key for us to really get a realistic view of life in old age. In fact, everyone we’ve worked with so far has been very forthcoming and honest, I think, which is really encouraging.

The next day, we met with Ed and Selma. We talked about a common go-to: the food. Suffice it to say, everyone’s got their own opinion on that issue! Once again, Selma was from New York. (Did I mention that Ceil and Sam are, too?) Ed is our first born-and-raised Dallasite. Great Texas accent: my kinda guy. Really nice. We can’t wait to film with both of them again. Selma paints and plays bridge quite a bit, and she also attends “winery” (happy hour!) on Mondays–we’ll definitely be checking that out with her. But she said she only drinks orange juice there!

And finally, on our third day, we sat down with Ceil and her husband, Ed, for a few minutes in their apartment. They’re both really funny. Ed fed us chocolate-covered pretzels and propped up his legs on an ottoman for the interview with his pant legs pulled up to reveal pink socks beneath his khaki pants. Ceil called attention to them, and he said, So what? He likes them! He recounted his time spent in the army, in Japan in particular, and also told us about how he first met Ceil. He said, “I told my friend I was lookin’ for a broad!”

We followed them and my grandmother to dinner and shot in the dining hall. Everyone was looking at us, so we went table by table and told everyone who was looking on what was going on. They were all really interested about the project. Needless to say, it’s been an incredible beginning of production, and we can’t wait to keep going–we’re shooting through the holidays!

status update

status update

CHECK OUT THOSE INTRO CLIPS BELOW!!

THESE are some of the individuals with whom we will be working with for the next few months! They are quite the characters:

Sam: very audible, great to converse with; jolly. He’s intrigued by our equipment and seems excited to be working on the film. He also hinted that he has had at least THREE romances since being in a retirement community, so I feel he will be able to give us quite the insight on romance and relationships for seniors.

Ceil: This woman is incredible! She is very sassy, blunt, honest, and so frank, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at most of her “normal” comments. She’s been down with a virus for the past week, so we are hoping to get interviewing with her when she feels better.

Dorothy: Calm and comfortable, Dorothy can talk for quite a while but has the grace to not go so far as to “talk your ear off.” Though she’s a very relaxed southern woman, I still get the sense that she too can be very upfront and stick to her guns.

It was a phenomenal first day–the equipment performed wonderfully and we’ve met some great seniors to work with. If the following clips don’t say it, then the footage in the coming days hopefully will.

status update

jared, status update

Well, tomorrow is our first day of shooting! Since my arrival, Jared and I have been familiarizing ourselves with the newly arrived equipment, setting up our work flow, and goal-setting. This process has involved anything from reading manuals at seemingly laborious page-by-page speeds, assembling each and every part, and actually getting both sound and picture up and running and doing “tests.”

As tedious as some of this preparation may sound, the plus side is that we certainly have found many awesome features to our Panasonic HMC150 ! For example, the camera offers three ways in assisting focus:

1. The frame “expands” or zooms in (punches in, in the industry lingo) on the center of the original frame. You can then focus on that original center, and it quickly punches back out.
2. You can also choose to place a graph in the top right of the flip-out LCD screen. The graph shows a fuzzy, exponential-like curve that becomes more circular as the object comes more into focus.
3. Lastly, there is a focus-assist feature that accentuates the edges/contour lines of anything in the frame that is in focus. So, when your object is finally in focus, those lines jump out a lot to indicate the achieved focus.

Isn’t that awesome?

I might as well add/admit, that if our Manfrotto Tripod was actually a real man, I would already be head over heels, weak in the knees, falling for “him”. I’m that in love with it!

Our work flow in this context is the way that we will operate as a team from the beginning of shooting through our final cut of the film. To start, we will be filming anywhere from 3-6 hours a day. This is dually convenient since we will then have the remainder of the day to both transfer our footage to the hard drives for editing; and also, these shorter days will give the individuals with whom we are working with a chance to get comfortable with us and our equipment (the last thing we would want to do is impose on anybody’s home!).

As we continue shooting, we expect to spend more time with our participants (the “stars” of the film!) through conversations, activities, and their respective lifestyles. Much later in production, as we accumulate hours and hours of footage, Jared and I will take breaks to generate some “rough cuts,” or some loosely compiled scenes around 20-30 minutes to see what direction our characters are taking us in. These rough cuts will in effect re-direct our shooting, and so forth. As we discovered while making the previous, shorter version of Life’s Waltz in our final semester at USC, a documentary’s story is created in the editing room. Unlike fiction film, where you start with the story/script and create the film based on that, documentary (at least for us) is the opposite: shoot a bunch of footage, then find the story/script in the editing room. This then has bearing on how we will proceed with shooting, so it’s a reciprocal process of “writing” the story in the editing room with footage already obtained and then refining our focus of what we shoot based on the emerging story.

Lastly, Jared and I have some personal, creative, administrative, and technical goals. These goals include everything from maintaining our Life’s Waltz blog to learning how to transcode footage and exercising some self-discipline in getting enough sleep (my body likes 7hrs minimum as we essentially dedicate our lives to this project.

Technical Goal #1 for Ashley:

1. Improve sound mixing skills and boom operation while shooting.

That’s a mouthful, but basically, I’m a less experienced with sound and other technical components of production than Jared. I’m sure this frustrates him at times, so I’m making it another goal of mine to observe and absorb as many of his superhero-gonna-figure-out-just-about-anything googolplex of skills to help improve our production efficiency too.

equipment, status update, workflow