Well, the time has come; I made the announcement to our regional chapter of the SFO yesterday, and plans are underway.
The “world premiere” — well, actually more like a “sneak preview” — of my documentary, A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary, will be held at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Melville (Long Island) New York, on Tuesday June 1, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. The screening is free and all are welcome. The film will still be in a rough state, with temporary narration and music track. There will hopefully be time for questions and answers afterward.
Many thanks to the pastor, Fr. Frank Schneider, and Pauline and Ralph DiCicco for making this happen.
How to get there:
The address is 175 Wolf Hill Road Melville, NY 11747
From Points West
- Northern State Parkway East to exit 41 (Wolf Hill Rd.)
- Make a left turn onto Wolf Hill Rd.
- Go straight through 2 traffic lights.
- Parish grounds are immediately after St. Anthony’s High School on the right. Park in large rear lot.
- The screening will be held in the Hospitality Room.
Now that tax time is (whew!) over for another year, I want to catch up on a few things.
My two stories on the Pope’s (non)-scandal have gained a tremendous amount of interest for this blog, but because of all the time I had to spend on them a few other things suffered.
Here’s a roundup:
Documentary
One project that suffered was actually beyond my control. The work on the St. Elizabeth documentary, which I had hoped would soon be far enough along for me to show a fairly good amount of completed footage with a temporary narration and music track, has been stalled for almost a month. It started with the computer crash on March 20 that I’ve already mentioned. It was a week before the store would condescend to back up the files from disk, though I in fact had most of them backed up already. In the meantime, I was able to use my spare laptop, but it was useless to think of working on video there, because the hard drive was so small.
Well, the hard drive was defective, so the store allowed me to trade in my computer. Then when I got my new laptop (and 500GB hard drive!) home, and all the files had been painstakingly copied back to the right directories — the documentary project file would either refuse to open or would indicate it couldn’t find any of my files. Another frustrating couple of weeks. I first tried to do this on Holy Saturday, at the same time I was helping Jimmy with the famous article.
Right after Easter, I was online with the tech geeks at Adobe, but it was some time before I got the problem solved. And unfortunately, the solution was to re-link all the video in the edited project to the original files, one at a time. That took a lot of time, but fortunately, all my original editing decisions had been saved, and I didn’t have re-do any of that. All the same, a good amount of time has been lost. I feel that I really owe an explanation to everyone who has been waiting patiently for the documentary to be done.
I do expect to have more news soon, including the date(s) I will be showing the footage in the New York area, and some more interesting news I hope as well.
Find out more about the film and donate to its completion HERE
As a consolation, here are a couple of more stills, from the famous scene of the roses:
Book News
In other news, the original print run of The Greatest of These is Love, my biography of St. Elizabeth, has just officially sold out (except for maybe 3-4 copies on Amazon). Get the last ones while you can! I do hope, when I have time, to put out an updated digital edition for Kindle, E-Pub and the like.
Our Patron
And, in all my attention to scandals and taxes, I missed the feast day (in the old Church calendar at least) of the patron saint of this blog, St. Justin Martyr, on April 14. I’ve got to find a picture of him and put it up, but in the meantime here is my imaginary letter to him that serves as the blog’s mission statement:
Update: Here’s something even better — a video on him!
Here is the (more or less) final version of the trailer for A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary. With many thanks to Fr. Amando Trujillo-Cano for the use of his great song “Santa Isabel, Ensenanos a Amar.” (St. Elizabeth, Teach us to Love.”
Stay tuned for more news on the film as it takes shape.
Here it is - it’s taken a lot of work. This one was based largely on the interviews done in our last round of celebrations in Hungary, but covers a bit of every place we shot in. This time, the interviews were almost all in English, so I made this an English-language only trailer.
This is really a rough, unfinished version; there are still a lot of problems. One of the biggest is due to the fact that Michael was unable to use his light package in Hungary — his high-powered lights blew out the fuses in the place where we were staying. So we couldn’t move around for interviews, and had to gather as many of the lamps and other lights the Manreza Center could find for us all in one place — Michael’s room. So every interview was shot in the same spot, and from almost the same angle. It can be very tiring to look at. I hope there will eventually be some way to fix all this in editing, or at least not to have so many of the interviews with the same background one after another.
On the other hand, this one uses a greater variety of images, and is faster-moving and more visually exciting than the first trailer.
There will be more edited footage as time goes on. So keep checking back.
I must confess that I have been very remiss about putting up any updates about the St. Elizabeth documentary since the end of December (here). A great deal has happened, not all of it good, but things finally seem to be back on track.
On returning from Hungary with a disk drive containing all the footage our camerman Michael shot, plus the tapes from my own camcorder, I expected to be able to start editing, or at least viewing the footage, right away. But when I made my first phone call to my mother when I arrived home, she informed me of my uncle Joe’s death. I left right away, and only after I returned from the funeral and Thanksgiving holidays did I discover that the drive was unusable. I couldn’t even read it with my computer.
Long-distance consultation with Michael didn’t help; I gave the disk to my brother Nick at Christmas, and he couldn’t access it either. So it eventually went back to Michael, who discovered that though it was supposed the be cross-platform, the formatting of the files themselves (at least that’s what I think he said), made it impossible to read on anything but a Mac. So he had to re-copy every one of the some 300 gigs of footage through his computer network from a Mac to a PC and then to the portable drive - which took around 200 hours. Which would have been fine, but he had to be absent on other filming gigs a good deal of the time during the next four months. I didn’t receive the footage until the middle of April, five months after I returned home. And even then we found footage that had not been copied, which had to located.
In the meantime, a lengthy illness, five separate tax returns for the back sales tax for my business, plus regular taxes on April 15, made it nearly impossible to keep up with my regular job (freelancers don’t get paid time off), let alone other tasks like writing the script and obtaining permissions for using still images and archive footage. I also had to test out various editing programs, and started learning to use Adobe Premiere Pro.
Then at long last, when everything was all set for editing, my laptop stopped working. The motherboard had fizzled out. Back it went to the company for repairs (thank goodness it was still under warranty), Then I had a replacement computer to set up, and finally to work — though I no longer had the trial version of Adobe Premiere, which was on the other laptop (you’re only allowed one trial version). To save time, I decided to resort to using the simple Windows editing program that I already knew for the trailer. Then when everything was ready again, I discovered that the drive I had copied my own footage on had failed. There were parts I hadn’t transferred to my laptop, so they had to be captured from tape again.
In the meantime, I finally got some good news: the Presidency of the International Council of the SFO (CIOFS) would be able to reimburse me for some of the filming expenses. They are also going to put the trailer on their web site and help promote the video when it’s done.
So things really seem to be back on track now, and the trailer at least is close to completion. In spite of the frustration, seeing all the tons of disconnected footage you shot finally connect and come alive into an actual story is thrilling. We already have a trailer from 2007 that focused on our interviews in Rome; this short teaser trailer will focus more on the actual experience of the Franciscans of the various orders who attended the celebrations in Rome, Assisi, Esztergom and Budapest, as well as an outline of Elizabeth’s life. It should be much more visually exciting than the first trailer.
So keep checking back here for the trailer, which I hope will be done in a couple of days. Then on to editing the real thing!
Oh and one more thing; if you want to be put on the e-mail list to receive updates about the documentary, just write to me at editor@taucrossbooks.com.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The history of the Catholic missions is by now a long road: at the beginning of that road is the Father of Mercy, who holds out his arms to all his children. All those who encounter the missionaries encounter the Father. And they also encounter the Son, the first missionary, who, obeying the Father, comes to earth, becomes flesh in human nature, is one of us, in solidarity with our misery (except for sin) and ends up dying for us in order to then return to heaven, carrying on his shoulders the human race his has won back.
Out of the same mold are the missionaries, who repeat, in some way, his journey. They too leave their fathers and families and depart to go among a foreign people. They too strip themselves of the refined culture they have acquired in their homelands; and of their native customs and habitat, of a hundred little comforts, in order to be in solidarity. With who? With a people who are on one hand naked and poor, and on the other rich in possibilities, which the missionaries intend to respect, value and elevate."
Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I), to the people of his diocese of Vittorio Veneto, on his return from the diocesan missions in Africa in 1966
