I was the official photographer of the South Carolina Dressage and Combined Training Association year end awards banquet.  Check out the photos on Facebook!  Larger versions are available for purchase, both digitally and in print.  Contact me (rebecca at wisemare dot com) for details.

One of my less popular, but nonetheless strongly held, beliefs about media is that in the case of a story that has been told in both book and movie form, you should see the movie first. I realize that this is heresy to a lot of people; probably to a lot of people I greatly respect. But my reasoning is that movie adaptations are almost always at least a little bit of a disappointment relative to their literary counterparts, and that by choosing to read the book first, you are very likely cheating yourself out of full enjoyment of the movie.  (Exception: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.)

There are at least two reasons that movies are usually somewhat less awesome than the books they come from:

1.)  Authors who don’t anticipate that their books will eventually be made into movies often don’t write books that are well suited to adaptation. (Case in point, oddly, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which makes Jackson’s films all the more of a triumph.)

2.)  People who enjoy reading often have excellent imaginations.  Not only does that make it likely that a film rendering, which is constrained by physical, technological, budgetary, and temporal limitations, will be less awesome than one unconstrained by anything but the depth of a person’s imagination, but it also makes it likely that any two readers of the same source material will go off on wildly different tangents in their separate imaginations.  So, a devoted book fan can find him/herself sitting in a theater and thinking, indignantly, “That’s not how it happened!”, even if s/he has just witnessed a marvel of modern filmmaking.

Now, the boy Potter.

For the Harry Potter series, I broke my own rule.  I did see the first two movies before reading any of the books, but from that point I read ahead.  Waiting for the movies would have meant waiting years, and I just couldn’t do it.  But, indeed, I was disappointed with the third movie, which, until the arrival of Deathly Hallows Part 2, was widely believed to be the best of the series.  I was indignant about a wide variety of omissions, but most especially the identities of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs.  I could, of course, still see that it was a good movie, but I greatly missed things that were left out.  Likewise, I was so looking forward to the fifth movie, and the Weasley twins’ triumphant moment in it, but when it came and went, I was underwhelmed.  “That’s not how it happened,” I thought.  And since I adore Weasleys the most of all, that moment was a particular let down.

(On the other hand, the end of the fifth movie was outstanding and cemented forever my fanhood of David Yates and Slawomir Idziak. I just wish that Fred and George’s moment had been grander.)

While there were a few moments in the Deathly Hallows Part 2 that left me slightly underwhelmed, overall I think it comes the closest any of the movies have come to matching the greatness of the books.  I would say that it’s nearly as good as the book.  In fact, I’d say that about both Deathly Hallows movies.  And this is as it should be.  Together, DH1 and DH2 are a fitting and beautiful end to the Harry Potter movie series.

There were really only two moments in DH2 when I found myself thinking “That’s not how it happened.”  The first was Molly’s moment.  I’ll refrain from saying anything more.  If you’ve read the book, you know.  If you haven’t, I won’t spoil it.  The second was the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort.  Where were the people?  I found it a strange departure from the book that Harry and Voldemort were alone in that moment.  It was beautiful and cinematic, but… Where were the people?  I mean, it works, I guess, but… where were the people?

Really, though, that’s it in terms of my list of personal qualms with the movie.  And there was a lot about the film to celebrate.  When DH1 came out, I joked that they ought to have called it Harry Potter and the Mystical British Landscapes, and DH2 is just as beautiful.  It’s also a great film for everyone’s favorite ‘swirl of tartan’, Professor McGonagall.  And for the kids.  The kids have never acted better.  I thought every one of them was really fantastic, from Harry’s penultimate moments with Voldemort, to Neville’s big moment, to Seamus giddily taking on the mantle of demolitions expert.  Every one of them, brilliant.  And I’d be remiss if I used the word brilliant in this post without also tying it to Alan Rickman.  Although I’ve always appreciated his performances, I’ve never been a particular Snape fangirl, in either the books or the movies.  But, oh man.  Somebody give this man an Oscar.

And if you haven’t seen the movie yet, go today.  Because the mischief has been managed.

I actually began my video editing career in iMovie. The year was 2004, the place – Charlottesville, VA. I was a fourth year Astronomy major at the University of Virginia. The Astronomy department had been trying for the last few semesters to get undergraduates to make senior thesis movies instead of writing senior thesis papers or doing senior thesis experiments. (Astrophysics majors, on the other hand, were still required to do research projects.)

I jumped at the opportunity to do a video instead of a paper or experiment, and the movie I made became the first undergraduate film ever to be approved by the faculty for screening to the public. Despite that, I’m embarrassed by it in hindsight. I don’t even feel particularly confident in calling it a movie. It’s more like the love child of a movie and a Power Point presentation. (And not even in an Al Gore kind of way. (Although, to be clear, I liked An Inconvenient Truth. Not knockin’ it.))

Anyway, the point is: I made that first film… er… video… er… videopoint… in iMovie. I bought my first Mac after I got tired of being kicked out of the public labs at night, and taught myself how to use it. It was simple and intuitive.

Oh, how things have changed.

Fast forward through a few years of youthful career meanderings, and I’ve now spent four years using both Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro in professional and academic settings. A fellow grad student used to say that I was a Final Cut Wizard, and I quickly developed a reputation amongst my undergraduate students as The Person To Ask about editing. In saying this, I don’t mean aggrandize myself, but rather to illustrate that I’ve spent the last several years amassing a respectable amount of know how about non-linear editing.

And that makes it very irritating that I’ve had so much trouble with iMovie lately. Not only do I, of course, long for the features that are missing from the new iMovie altogether – keyframing, for example, which was included, in a very rudimentary way, in the old version of iMovie I used at UVa – but I’m also really irked by the lack of basic functionalities.

For example: There is no way to save your project in the current version of iMovie.

No, I’m not smoking crack. No, it doesn’t make any sense at all. No, I don’t blame you for not believing me. So, here, let me show you:

See? The Save and Save As options are not just grayed out. They’re not there at all. If you’re thinking, as I did, “Surely there’s another way”, here’s what the Help files have to say on the matter:

Now, look.  I know that iMovie is a consumer level product.  I know that the good people at Apple are trying to make it easy for parents to make movies of their kids’ soccer games.  But not having a Save option?  Who makes a program without a Save option?

I guess if the mystical Autosave feature WORKED, then there wouldn’t be a problem.  But it doesn’t.  Every time I’ve reopened my project, some of my changes from the last session (always to text items) have been lost.

The same thing has repeatedly happened to a friend and colleague who is working on the same project with me.  We are each using our own laptops – mine a MacBook Pro, hers a MacBook, and both running the latest versions of both iMovie and Snow Leopard – and we are both losing changes to text items between sessions.

I also find the non-proportional Timeline enraging.  And the different functionalities you get when the clip is outlined by a thin yellow line versus a thick yellow line.  And the inability to layer clips on top of one another.  And the inability to share files from one computer to another.  And the fact that the damn thing crashes.   (An Apple program!  That crashes!  WTF?!)  And… and… there’s just so much I hate about this program!

But, unfortunately, it’s what we’ve got to work with.  We’re teaching adolescents video production and editing.  We only have four 3 hour sessions in which to do it.  And only about 1 and a half of those sessions will be available for editing.  There’s no way we can possibly teach them Final Cut or Premiere in that amount of time.  (Although, after all the nonsense I’ve endured with iMovie lately,  I can’t say I haven’t been tempted to try.)

Anyway, if you’re still with me after all that ranting, here’s why I’m using iMovie in the first place. It’s my mockup of what we’ll be doing with the Juvenile Arbitration kids later this summer.  The kids will be choosing and writing their own stories and doing their own photography and editing.  I just did a run through on my kitchen table to see what problems we were likely to encounter.  Most of them, as you might have gathered, are in the editing.  But, on the photography side, it also proved very tricky to keep the dolls standing up.  Ultimately, I put them in empty glass jars…  jam jars, pickle jars, mason jars, etc. … and resolved not to shoot them below the waist.  One of my colleagues has now procured some dedicated doll stands, though.  So that will make things easier.

Anyway, here it is:  Barbie Fights Back.

Here’s Karen Hatfield and Striker, last ride of the day, in an arena that had become quite dusty in the afternoon sun. I kind of like the image of a white horse, emerging from the clouded landscape. There’s something almost mystical about it.

Another sight you don’t see every day: a lady riding sidesaddle. This is Helen Dellacroce, riding Smoke.

The Sam Gilliam Project: Kids Helping Kids from Rebecca Boyd on Vimeo.

I’m gearing up for another series of Juvenile Arbitration workshops.  I taught two series last summer, working in partnership with Dr. Olga Ivashkevich, who is an Art Education professor at the University of South Carolina.  We taught the kids, who are first time offenders referred by the Juvenile Justice system, how to use prosumer video cameras, lights, and microphones; and then the kids made infomercials on topics of their own choosing.  Here’s an example:

This summer, we’re teaming up again, and we’re going to be teaching stop motion animation, using Barbie dolls.  I was doing a test run moments ago, when the camera battery died.  I took it as a sign that it was time to update the blog.

When the battery is recharged, I’ll go back to my mockup, but honestly, I was shooting blindly.  Just taking pictures of different poses, hoping a story would come to me in the process.  So it’s probably good that I’ve sat down to do some stream of conscious blogging.  I tried to write a script before I started shooting, but – for the first time in a long time – I encountered really intractable writer’s block.

I’m tempted to copy one of the infomercials from last year, since this is just a test to see what problems I run into and how I might steer the students clear of them.  But that feels like cheating.  And, really, writer’s block is one of the problems the students might run into.  I think I will have the old ‘draw a character and a situation out of a hat’ solution standing at the ready when we actually do this, for those who are truly unable to think of something.

I’m sitting on my front porch as I type this.  It’s dark out, and there are bugs flying all around the porch light.

Oh.  Idea.  Suzie is typing up an angry email to Sally.  She hits Send and immediately regrets it.  Sally reads it and is devastated.  Except, do kids use email anymore?  Maybe Suzie should be texting.  (Bah!  I h8 txting.  But all the kidz r doin it.  lol fml)

In any case, the bugs around the porch light.  It’s beetle season.  I can’t remember by what measure, whether it’s number of individuals or number of species, but beetles apparently make up 25% of the life on this planet.  Whoa.

The insects are very cyclical here in South Carolina.  First come the flies, then come the wasps, then come the beetles, then the spiders, then the katydids.  Also, apparently this is a cicada year.  So there’s that to look forward to.

Truthfully, I find beetles kind of scary.  When I pick them out of the water trough, they cling to my finger.  The ones that fly tend to have crazed, unpredictable flight paths.  I don’t like the unpredictability.  I like bugs that allow me to give them a wide berth.  Spiders are usually great like that.

I hope I have some writing spiders on the front porch this year.  I’ve seen one or two tiny ones already in passing, but none have set up shop yet.  And I suspect that a huge percentage of the tiny ones get eaten by other creatures – lizards, birds, what-have-you. 

I’m quite fond of writing spiders.  They’re slow and pretty and not poisonous.  And they get enormous.  Every year so far at least one has set up a web on my front porch.  And every year I give her a name and greet her each day when I arrive home.  Here’s hoping I have that opportunity again this year.  They seem to settle down in June or July.

Zoe: July 2010

Anyway.  Angry texting.  Or cyberbullying, maybe.  I suppose I should try writing a little script along those lines.  And maybe I’ll post the result.  In fact, I’ll definitely post the result.  Once it’s good.

On a superficial level, I didn’t like it stylistically. The fast cuts, large depth of field, numerous onscreen titles, and shaky camera combined to create a rushed, jangling experience. It was like watching Grey’s Anatomy through the eyes of my Border Collie. But more importantly, it also represented a huge leap backwards in terms of the viewer’s level of intimacy with the characters. As a documentary filmmaker, I feel slightly sheepish admitting this. As a documentary filmmaker who is also an aspiring screenwriter, it gives me some interesting things to think about.

In a documentary, real or feigned, we see what the characters, camera operator, and editor allow us to see. In a narrative, we see what the editor, camera operator, and writer allow us to see. I’m oversimplifying, of course. It takes a village to make a movie, and I don’t mean to in any way diminish the efforts of the many, many people whose positions I have not listed here. The point is: in documentaries, the characters have a degree of control over what we see of them. They can, and usually do, choose to keep us at some distance. In a traditional, third person point of view narrative, however, we become a fly on the wall, and we can see everything (or nearly everything) that’s going on.

So, a ‘normal’ Grey’s Anatomy episode makes us feel like we know the characters in real life. (Or, that we are watching them through phenomenally well placed hidden cameras.) In truth, we actually know them much better than we know people in real life. We get in bed with them. We are in the bathroom stall with them while they’re taking a pregnancy test. We’re there in the supply closet while they’re having an emotional breakdown (and/or illicit tryst). Even when the characters are excluding their very best friends, we’re there; and we see them as they are, not as they would present themselves to us if they knew we were watching. By contrast, in a documentary, the characters usually do know that we’re watching, and we know that they know that we’re watching, and there are varying degrees of mutual suspicion on both sides of the camera.

I shouldn’t go any further without pointing out something obvious: it’s all fake. The people we are being so intimate with don’t even exist. But if they did exist – if Grey’s Anatomy were a reenactment of real people’s real lives – I think there’s a convincing argument to be made that we can get a more authentic representation through an ethically produced, reenacted narrative docudrama than through a documentary that shows events as they happen.

Ethically produced. That’s critical. Obviously, it’s entirely possible for a (village of) filmmaker(s) to create a ‘based on the true story’ narrative film that is nothing at all like the true story. And it’s equally possible for a documentary crew to create a “lying” documentary. (Sleazy political TV ads are a great example of this in miniature.) But, if we assume that a given set of narrative filmmakers and a given set of documentary filmmakers are equally committed to telling the truth, I think we have to consider that the narrative genre is sometimes better equipped to make an accurate representation.

This is because, as anyone who has lived a remotely interesting life can attest, the truth is complex. It’s complex in space, and it’s complex in time. And, although I often find myself talking about what a great medium documentary film is for communicating multiple dimensions of a given subject, there is no way that a camera, or even a fleet of cameras, can capture the entire truth of any story as it unfolds.

Of course, there’s also no way that a narrative crew can capture the entire truth of a story, either. Everything we make is a constructed representation, and no representation – documentary, narrative, or experimental – is perfect. That’s Filmmaking 101. But I think perhaps the reenacted docudrama can, under certain conditions, get closer to reality than the watch-as-it-happens documentary.

Consider the film Hotel Rwanda. (If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this and go watch it NOW.) The real Paul Rusesabagina worked with the writers and the filmmakers to tell his story, and the result is a film that is visceral, emotionally gripping, and basically historically accurate. A film like Hotel Rwanda tells you a true story in a way that reflects not just the succession of events, not just the face that the character is comfortable presenting in the moment; but also the things going on inside the characters, the things that the characters only realized were relevant in hindsight, the things that the characters only become comfortable sharing after the passage of time, and the things that a cameraman (or group of cameramen) could not have captured without advance preparation.

All that said, I still choose to be a documentary filmmaker. The main reason I work in documentary is because I want to help people (including myself) understand each other and the world around them. And I do think documentary is a great medium in which to do that. After all, all film is a construction, and it is a huge ethical responsibility to represent people to the world. Jay Ruby actually says that because of this, the only way to make an ethical documentary is to make one that is reflexive. (That is, a documentary that refers to itself as a construction of human filmmakers, rather than as an objective carbon copy of reality.) Unfortunately, calling attention to the constructed nature of the film doesn’t generally work with the traditional narrative style. (I’m having trouble thinking of any examples of reflexive narrative films. Leave me some suggestions in the Comments.) So, in that regard, documentary is better able to ethically represent reality, even if narrative has a higher capacity for accurately representing reality. Hmmm. There’s an interesting tension there, I think.

All of this also calls to my mind the work of George Stoney. George Stoney is one of the rock stars of American documentary film and one of my personal heroes. Born in 1916 and still teaching at NYU today, Stoney began his filmmaking career making government documentaries in the 1940’s. His style is one of cooperative filmmaking; and in many of his early films, including the famous All My Babies, Stoney asked the people who were the subjects of his films to perform their own lives.  It’s a strategy that allows the filmmaker more control over the evolution of the story, while still allowing the characters to control the face they present to the world.

Of course, this approach also takes the writing and acting out of the hands of people who have spent their lives honing the arts of writing and acting. Would Paul Rusesabagina have played himself as well in Hotel Rwanda as Don Cheadle did? I don’t know. And that’s a whole other can of worms.

Anyway, I guess this is all just a very long-winded way of saying that Grey’s Anatomy has inspired me to try writing a docudrama while simultaneously making a documentary. Now, to find an appropriate story…

This afternoon I saw Secretariat: The Impossible True Story. I went into the theater skeptical and left pleasantly surprised.  I’ll probably buy it when it hits DVD, or at least Netflix it.

Before I jump into creative commentary, I do feel obliged to mention that, as a lifelong horse person, and I am frequently appalled by horse-work in movies.  Someone’s always yanking the horse’s mouth, jabbing the horse in the ribs, or flopping around on its back like a 200 pound sack of potatoes.  Happily, I didn’t catch any of that in Secretariat.  (That’s not to say that I might not see something on a second viewing, of course, but nothing jumped out at me on this first run through.)  So that was nice.  Nothing ruins a movie for me like bad horsemanship.  (The trailers alone kept me from ever seeing The Mask of Zorro.)

In addition to the lack of offensive horse-work, though, there is a surprising amount to recommend this film.  I quite loved the Diane Lane character, Penny Chenery, having been mentored by several tough, classy, straight-shooting Virginia horse ladies like her in my own life.  I wasn’t expecting to love her, though.  Before seeing the film, I had written off the character based on the preview trailers, which presented her as a caricature Woman In A Man’s World (copyright Disney 1995).  Happily, that turned out to be a side effect of trailer editing, and I left the theater feeling like Ms. Chenery was someone I had known all my life.

And if you’re thinking “But, Becca, I’ve never been mentored by a classy, straight-shooting Virginia horsewoman” , well, I think you’ll probably still be able to relate to her.  In addition to being a horse person, she’s also a working mom, a grieving daughter, and – well, fine – a woman in a man’s world.  Also, honestly, it’s hard not to like Diane Lane’s characters.  I have been prepared to hate several of them over the years, but every time she wins me over completely.

Also wonderful in this film was John Malkovich in the role of French Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.  He was weird enough to be delightful, normal enough to be believable.  And his costumes were a thing of beauty.  I find oddly dressed men incredibly endearing.  Actually, now that I think on it, all the costumes were strong in this film.    I left the theater with a distinct desire to wear long white gloves and a sparkly brooch to my next formal occasion.  (You may have to remind me, though:  my formal occasions are few and far between.)

And then there was the cinematography.  There were a few odd zooms here and there, and the hand-held, documentary-style pans at the end of the Belmont sequence were a bit jarring, but overall the film was a visual treat that made me quite homesick for Virginia horse country.  And the racing scenes were the best I have ever seen on film.  Never before have I known a movie to make so close an approximation to what it really feels like to ride a galloping horse.  It, I must admit, was a tremendous improvement over the racing scenes in my very favorite horse movie: Seabiscuit.  So, kudos to DP Dean Semler!

Really, my only problems with this movie are related to its narrative structure.  I need to see it again – and take notes as I watch – in order to make a detailed critique, but certainly a lot of the structural wonkiness stems from the fact that the real story of the real horse and his real humans isn’t really structured like a movie.  Too many climaxes and too many years to cover in the span of 2 hours.  My hunch is that it could be tightened up a bit with some tweaks to the writing and editing, but – again – I need to watch it a second time to be able to substantiate (or, hat in hand, retract) that claim.  Also, as long as I’m nit picking:  I really wish that they had left in (or, well, put in) the crowd noise underneath the music at the end.  Having the soundtrack go music-only there felt sterile to me.

But what do I know?  Go watch the movie.  See if you agree.

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