My First World Premiere!
Or at least that’s what it feels like. I returned Sunday night from the Franciscan Center in Andover, Mass., where on Saturday I played the first footage of my documentary — some edited footage from our interviews on St. Elizabeth — for an audience. It was not more than 40 people, all Secular Franciscans, but to me, it was as exciting as any Hollywood premiere. To my relief, it was a great success, though not without suspense.
Due to some unexpected delays, we weren’t able to start editing until 10 days before the event. The editing process itself was fascinating. My brother Nick sent me a DVD with the footage he’d shot, and I looked through it, selecting the clips I wanted, putting them in some sort of coherent order, and writing down time codes for them. For the interviews that weren’t in English, I wrote down a summary of each, then transcribed and translated the parts I wanted, and sent Nick the translation to be put as subtitles. We intended this to be temporary, since there was simply no time to get English voiceovers done. We also edited in some digital still images of artwork on Elizabeth that reflected the themes of her life the interviewees described. The last step was a temporary music track. Nick was able to upload the complete ten-minute “teaser” to his server, and I downloaded it on Wednesday night at the library where I work and we burned it to DVD. The latest digital technology is amazing - otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible.
I was very nervous when I got to the Center on Friday, so I asked to check out the TV-DVD player setup that night before my talk the next day. It was a good thing too, since the TV they had brought up did not have a DVD player, but a VHS one. We looked around the building and got a DVD player, plus a very fine large screen TV with built-in stereo speakers. So the performance itself went off without a hitch and looked and sounded beautiful. The stereo speakers make a great diference in the sound! Much better than on my old TV.
Everyone was very impressed, and they are starting to raise some money for me. They took up a collection on the spot and will combine it with what they will raise at home in their fraternities.
One thing rather surprised me: they all seemed to be strongly in favor of keeping the interviews in the original languages with subtitles - they said they loved having the original intonations and personalities of the interviewees come through. I don’t know if that’s true of everyone, but I will also play the footage for my fraternity in about two weeks and can judge the reaction there. If the majority feel that way, we will probably end up keeping the subtitles.
Carmel, who is minister of my fraternity, also spoke to the regional meeting here in New York on the same day, Saturday. I hope we will get some volunteer help from this if we do some shooting in New York as I hope.
So far, so good. But there is so much work still to do. . .
