See What I'm Saying

Houston/Beware of bonding with the dog

Back to logging and I’m into the Alysha footage. We caught up with Alysha at college in Houston where she’s a sophomore and just starting to live on her own! I didn’t do that till my senior year btw, but then again, Alysha’s jumped out of an airplane and climbed the Andes and Kilimanjaro at this point and yeah, that hasn’t happened (yet) for me either at 35 so no point comparing.

During the summer, Alysha had gotten her first seeing eye dog, Hammar (yes correct odd spelling) and Hammar is definitely going to stick with me.  In addition to being extraordinarily cute, Hammar just reminded me of Alysha – FAST.  That dog could sprint, and did.  Poor Jose had to keep up with Hammar and Alysha on a 90 degree day running the length of a huge campus, backwards with camera.  He was a little irritated about that.  Sometimes camera will have a spotter, in this case me, running behind them, to guide their movements and keep them from hitting things.  Something to think about when you see someone walking quickly towards the camera in a documentary frame.

Things got interesting later when we were doing our sit down interview and Hammar wouldn’t stop licking Jose; eventually they bonded and when we went to film Alysha walking the following day it got even tougher as Hammar would walk twice to catch up with his new friend Jose who now had to run twice as fast to film.  A cautionary production tale in allowing licking.

taxes and the beauty of b-roll

Well, I've gotten better—I do actually have binders with dividers and receipts under each category, but today is the first day I'm going THROUGH the receipts; you know what's expensive? Coffee. This is a super-low budget film, but I'm thinking maybe a quarter of our budget is going into coffee, and feeding Jose of course. ;) Just kidding.

In case you're wondering, I'm still logging. My favorite, most recent moment on tape was a frame from some B-Roll.  B-Roll is a term used to describe footage that gives you a sense of place, but isn't a part of the primary action. Like driving down the street in New Orleans or, if I had money, a helicopter shot of any city—that would be B-Roll. Or in this case of the footage I'm talking about—I was looking at some B-Roll of the outside of the Library of Congress where Henry was playing November 1st, opening for Allen Toussaint. The Library was showcasing original compositions by Jelly Roll Morton who had also played on the same stage as Henry; since Jelly Roll was a piano player from New Orleans, like Henry and Allen, it all seemed to make sense.

Anyway, for that shoot day, I was working with a veteran shooter named Michael Ford, an extremely cool
talented guy, who's been doing docs for 30 odd years. The day we were shooting Henry was running long on rehearsal so Michael had to wait outside of the Library for awhile in order to film Henry walking to his hotel (where we would do our interview).  So while he was waiting, Michael got some really pretty footage of the outside of the Library of Congress at sunset.  The frame that got me excited (I don't know if this makes me a video/photo appreciation geek or what) was a neat moment where Michael was focused on the Poseidon statue that is at street level in front of the Library. It takes up about half the frame—a very muscle-y, forged from stone, stern looking Poseidon and then in the background, softly filling out the rest of the frame, was a D.C. man in a business suit, balding, with a cell phone—I just loved the contrast of god and man...a very modern man.

Perhaps I've been logging too much? I couldn't agree more. ;)