The Five Stages of Grief
I had the good fortune of being recommended to a local university student as a videographer for her creative project…
The project was to be a creative expression representing the Five Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance). It could be anything — a short story, dance, music, painting, whatever. The only stipulation by the professor was that it had to be “artistically arresting.”
No pressure.
Elizabeth chose a martial arts kata interpretation. My job was to shoot her choreography and choose a location.
- A week and a half ago, I scouted for a locale and decided on a nice wooded trail with great foliage. A perfect site with lots of variation, both natural and man-made for the theme of Japanese warrior, kung-fu type expression.
- Met Elizabeth the following Sunday (week ago) and shot the whole thing in under 2 hours. Couldn’t believe how cooperative the weather was and the shoot in general. It helped immensely that Elizabeth was so well prepared with her katas, because I shot multiple takes from different angles. So her consistent movements were key to easier editing later.
- That night after reviewing the footage, my boot drive cratered! Couldn’t believe the luck. Stupid Murphy.
- On Monday night, I bought a new drive and installed a fresh copy of OS X Panther and iLife ‘05 (iMovie).
- Edited like a fool all week for the Friday deadline.
- Burned a DVD and made a backup VHS tape for the Elizabeth on Thursday night. She was very pleased with the outcome.
Overall, we were very happy with how it turned out. The edited movie was about 6 minutes long. The ONLY things that I was disappointed with were:
- Some pesky sound “blips” before and after clips in my timeline where audio was lowered to 0%. It seemed no matter what I did, I couldn’t get rid of about a 1-2ms duration of the audio of that respective clip. Even if the clip audio was killed to zero. Strange.
- Burning a DVD went great, but previewing it that night on my TV/DVD player was a little disappointing. There were strange digital pops and video glitches here and there. There were maybe 6 of these on the DVD.
Overall, it was a really fun project for me in the creative department. Let me know what you think of it!
So, without further ado, here it is.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4986336860881749996
