For all the jobs I am getting hired for, I might have to change the name of my website from The Video Slab to something more like “My Book About How Mom Died”. That’s what I have mainly been working on. One can only send in so many job applications and not get hired for so many obviously natural job fits…before you just acknowledge something different is planned for you. I now live in a UNESCO City of Literature. I have an entire book to copyedit before I start hunting for literary agents. So, yeah. It seems like the writing is on the historical building’s walls…it’s time to finally finish this book. That’s what I am working on. While the HR people either add or subtract my wide ranging life on paper from their slush piles, I am perfecting this book about my time as mom’s caregiver during the hardest year of my life. It’s a pretty wild experience.
Copyediting nearly a year’s worth of journal entries, 4 years after that worst year of your life is ummm…fuck. I dunno. Different conflicting things. It’s enlightening. Refreshing. Shocking. I read what is there and I don’t understand how I survived it on an actual literal level. When 60% of caregivers for people with dementia die before the person with the illness does…I have no idea how I am still alive.
Snapshot from a portion I was just editing:
“Update 2 PM – Hospital waiting room at the UVA Radiation Clinic
We arrive at the Rad clinic just in time to see the guy walking out of his treatment who always wears his “Real Men Rock Pink”. He’s been here I think every day that we’ve been. He also wears a pink baseball hat and pink Nike’s. I say this all like we’ve been doing this for months. We already feel like veterans. This is only our 6th day in the Radiology clinic. Also…why can’t my mom be THAT guy? Fired up. Facing the facts. Embracing the suck and getting it done with flair. That’s the mom I wanted to have. That’s the role model I needed.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it feels like we’ve been at this forever already, like we’ve seen pink shirt guy 100 times by now. He’s like the seating arrangement we already take for granted in this subterranean waiting room. These places have a time bending effect. Time moves slower down here, beneath street level…in the basement of the hospital-where people get irradiated, get sicker and pray for miracles.
You hear the shusshing of the piped in air. You hear the occasional beep of someone’s phone, reminding you that somewhere out there, there are people, without cancer, sending messages, to us unfortunates, way way way down here. Nurses walk in and out, you hear the swishing of their clothing. The bored person behind the reception desk has three fingers pushing into her cheek, elbow on the desk, probably checking her Facebook.”
Besides the book? I exercise a lot. My son and I have a deal going where we go the gym Monday – Friday. I go into a local park to walk at night just about everyday. I hit up local coffee shops and diners. I hang out with both kids whenever they have decided I am not annoying them 🙂
I read history books. Just picked up a new memoir. I saw the author give a talk last night. So I will be diving into that today, in my hammock, swinging somewhere in the wooded park.
Probably my favorite thing, besides being with my children, is walking through a graveyard on the way to the park. It’s a large one. It’s got style, somehow. It says a little something more about the dignity of death in the way the land lays with the trees and site stones in agreement of some kind. Walking through it in darkness and alone always feels like a powerful metaphor.
Hey…hey Charlie. Are you afraid of death? Walking through a large cemetery at night makes one wonder. The ghosts of all those people. Are they here? What I do, is invite them to show me something. After all, they have been where I am. They have walked around and wondered about how to make a living, about how to tell their stories, about how to be a good person. All of these headstones know more about life than I do. Before I join them in the ground, I just hope I can do so knowing I did things in a good way.
The “BLACK ANGEL” from the Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City.
So…yeah. I love freelancing. Kind of. If you like always searching for your next gig while working on your current gig, then yeah, I love it! So, not so much. I love the work. But I don’t love the constant hustle. To break the hustle cycle I have been looking for real live full time jobs with benefits. And it’s been a while since I have been out there in that world. And it’s like traveling in an astronaut suit through space because it’s a creative vacuum. It’s hard to breathe in an atmosphere that is trying to replace me/us.
I am seeking job postings with titles like: communications coordinator, creative director, social media manager, video editor, scriptwriter. And what I see coming back at me is:
-…you will be working with AI to craft best of class content… -…utilizing ChatGPT, you will be crafting original… -…must have experience using Canva to create original content for social media posts… -…Hi, I am a lifestyle influencer (who is about 19 years old) and can no longer keep up with the demand for creating my makeup videos, I have 1 million followers on YT and need to… -…if creating content set to extremely tight deadlines and using your skills to help market the latest product releases sounds exciting to you…
All hard won creative energy and talent is being harnessed by an economy that marches to the steady beat of “hungry for faster, more, right now”. For me, it’s sad to see that artists are asked to make things that make the world a worse place. When we apply the creative impulse for things so banal and useless, for too long, we invariably lose the feel of what creating ever meant. Creativity has always been a spiritually satisfying act. That has changed. We are way off script now.
That’s first level bad. What’s on the second level?
Our creative efforts are now being funneled into teaming up with AI, Canva and more…automated programs that (ironically) humans use to replace our creative endeavors that, oh yeah, have become inextricably linked to keeping a roof over our heads and food on our tables…shoes on our feet.
What’s wrong with Canva, with AI and more? Check out the phrasing from their own site about using Canva to create:
“No Design Experience Needed”
I began building my first website in 1997. My company was an outdoor guide service and I wanted in on marketing via this whole internet thing. I helped with the layout. I wrote the words. I took the pics. I paid two humans (real live people who needed food and shelter) to design the site in HTML code. PHP didn’t exist. WordPress didn’t exist. Their effort meant their company could thrive. I didn’t shortcut anything.
Now it’s “No Design Experience Needed”?
Soon, Canva will be making the entire site, the entire IG post, including the AI generated photo. Soon it will be commonplace for graphic designers to be using their skills to enter into other crowded job silos. But it’s not because AI is out to get us. It’s because many of us have subscribed to the “hungry for faster, more, right now” work culture for far too long. The economic machine we created (albeit in the past before it was “us”) has reached a tipping point, indeed surpassed it. The scary thing for me is how many of us (humans) are thrilled to embrace AI. Don’t be excited unless you are ready to help your friends pay their bills in the next few years. Because it’s coming.
Here is the progression:
“hungry for faster, more, right now” leads to “No Design Experience Needed” and finally… “No paid humans necessary”
This wouldn’t bother me if we weren’t simultaneously still living in an economy that requires us to work for our money. We can’t all go out and start growing veggies and tending livestock any longer. If you don’t have money, you lose access to healthy food, safe housing, medical care.
And yes, in a real way, Canva is just a symptom. In a world where someone can make a million dollars a year by simply putting on makeup in videos that AI can edit for free, that’s a symptom. We are all forgetting that being skilled at something useful is actually important and valuable. It’s a fact that using our hearts and minds and hands to make things, makes for a good life. If we can make money doing essentially nothing…we will also feel nothing…and then need distraction…say, like…a makeup video tutorial, or 10, on a Friday night-alone in our overly expensive rented room in a shared apartment in NYC.
By using our minds to create machines that replace our usefulness-well that’s a world that none of us are ready for. The only way out is to stop “hungry for faster, more, right now”.
How to convince people that it’s actually okay and beneficial to slow down?
I dunno. Ask Chat GPT?
As for me, I am on Team Human. Let’s slow down. And stop watching makeup videos like they are as important as a major world event.
I am always a bit self conscious when walking into a diner. I shouldn’t be. I am always in good company. Today, strung along the street side window are three men over the age of sixty.
Two of them are wearing beanie hats. One of them has the classic baseball cap. All of them hiding their bald heads from the chill or hiding the fact that they lost that hair long ago. I rebel, and remove my gray wool beanie, setting it down pointedly on the table. I haven’t had hair on top of my head since I was 25. Unfairness in the handsome department struck me early in life.
It doesn’t work though. I still look just like them. For we are all the same. Alone, older and lonely looking. Oh…and all of us are wearing glasses in order to read the menu. Hello 53 years of age. I wasn’t planning on meeting you and being single still but here we are at the Bluebird Diner in Iowa City, Iowa. My theory is that you don’t really notice the older-lonely-beanie boys in diners early in the morning unless you are one of them. I think we are invisible to most. I don’t like belonging to anything by virtue of default. This is my least favorite label. The lonely older guy sitting in the diner at 8 AM. The romanticism of sitting alone in diners wore off for me about 13 years ago.
My favorite past is sitting across from me. They just walked in. My favorite of all time…the period of my life that brought out my best. It’s a 6-top. Four kids and all of them under the age of 5. Within minutes the three older ones have knives in their hands, they are shaking the salt shakers, there are napkins on the floor. There is squealing and laughing. The parents are calm but also taking a lot of deep breaths and looking at one another across the milieu-wan smiles. I only had two kids to their four, but it’s the best thing I ever did.
That’s why I am here in Iowa City. My two kids, now 22 years old and 26 years old somehow both decided to move to this town in the last year. Then the requests for me to follow began late last year. And after I was done saying “but why did you have to move to Iowa City of all places”, I visited them for Christmas and actually found that I liked the place. And then came the plans to move here on my part, driven by many external forces, but all of my own design.
First of all, any parent who has adult children asking them to live nearby to them, must say yes. It’s an unwritten rule of life. If you have kids that enjoy your company enough to make this request, despite your uncountable mistakes as a parent…count yourself exceedingly fortunate and make haste to their location.
Secondly, I have “lived” in 123 places in the last four years. No. That’s not an exaggeration. I made a spreadsheet. I counted them up. And for the last 11 months I have been doing nothing but volunteering for things I believed in. I have been creating more than I have at any point in my life. I created a 19 episode podcast and directed a feature length movie.To keep my costs low so that I could focus on this work I decided to do housesitting and petsitting up and down the east coast of the USA. It’s unpaid. But you get a dog or cat to watch after and a free place to stay. Usually it’s a very nice place to be and in a very choice location.
I have been, in a real sense, without a place to call home since August of 2019. I had some short stints in a rented place here or there…but for all the rest of that time I have either been taking care of my parents in their home, camping, staying with friends, at an Airbnb or doing the housesitting/petsitting thing.
I haven’t had a home to rest within, in any real sense. And by this January, during my last scheduled petsitting gig on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington Vermont, I realized I couldn’t do this any longer. The free wheeling sense of adventure had evaporated. I got to the point where I was daydreaming about living in one town, having one job, and just being as stable and boring as humanly possible.
And so, Iowa City made sense for a lot of reasons.
I now live in a house built in the 1850’s. The ceiling in my room appears to be 15’ tall. The windows are about 12 feet tall and they have two layers of heavy wood paneling that folds to act as a solid curtain against the light and cold if need be. You can feel the history in the exposed floorboards with every delightfully creaky weary wooded step. Steam coaxes deep grumbles from the heater in the corner. The massive front door of the house probably weighs over 100 pounds and was shipped by horse and buggy, overland from a train station in Chicago in 1853. The streets out front bear the weight of cars on red bricks and the tires make an odd but pleasing squishy grubbly sound upon them. I can walk to town within minutes. 1800’s architecture and early 1900’s edifice are everywhere. One thing I gleaned from staying in 123 different places was a made list of “things I want to have when I finally stop moving around”. Because I made a study of how people who live in one place…lived. The main thing I noted is that most places don’t really have a sense of community if they don’t have walkability. If you can’t walk to a friend’s home, to where things are happening, to where you might take a bite or get a cuppa or read a book…that community is always lacking something. So top of my list was to get a place in a town where I could walk to the town center and where the town would have something worth walking to. To my surprise, Iowa City=A+ on that grading chart.
I also made note of the absurd housing costs everywhere I went. There was not one place where the locals didn’t trot out the now tired tale “after the pandemic housing prices are through the roof! People can’t find anywhere to live here now and even if they can find it, it’s too expensive!” When I found out how little my kids were paying for rent in Iowa City I really thought it was a typo. Or if not, it meant that Iowa City must simply be a truly undesirable place to live. Nope. Turns out it’s just mysteriously affordable. And local wages somehow are not far behind the cost of living here.
To wit…my plan was to settle in a lovely small Vermont town called Warren. I was just there last week saying goodbye to that postcard village. And a friend there told me that just recently a 200 sq foot bedroom, in a home shared with others, was going for $2000 a month. As I said, a number of reasons drove me to Iowa City. At some points, while I was living rent and mortgage free for most of the last 4 years, I have felt like an economic refugee. Fleeing the high cost of housing as a single person and knowing that if I rejoined the housing fray that my earnings couldn’t possibly land me in a home that I would want to live in. When you are single, it’s just way different. Your options for comfort are exactly cut in half, unless you are wealthy…which I am most certainly not. I am not Ken Burns. I have found a place to rent that I enjoy, in a lovely historic part of town…and it’s not expensive. It’s easy.
So, here I am. Iowa City. Day 1. There aren’t words with enough letters or enough lines on a page to explain my relief at knowing that I am living here. No longer moving. No longer searching. Just finally living in one place.
Work? Honestly…who knows? Though I planned on doing a very normal, very plain kind of job…alas. I am who I am. I have applied for those jobs and been passed over or turned them down. Currently I am feeling like I’d love to do something historical about Iowa City. Maps. Visual retrospectives. Maybe see if the city wants to throw some money into something interesting that visitors might want to use or see. I want to dust off my old cameras and take some still images. Maybe get back into some architectural photography? In short…I am feeling like freelancing is what I will end up doing again. And that’s sounding okay.
What I am currently doing however is:
-ghostwriter and business contact for a book about Ukraine and the work of one frontline humanitarian aid worker from the USA. We are seeking a publisher for the book! (screenshot for the book website that is still in development phase below)
-copyediting my prescriptive self help memoir about my time as a caregiver for my mother as she died from cancer and dementia during the peak of the pandemic. Seeking the traditional publishing route for this one too.
-self publishing a poetry book drawing from my last 15 years of writing poetry.
-possibly developing a podcast based on my movie 400 Feet Down.
The carver working their knife, whittling on a piece of red cedar…even they do not work alone. They carry with them the voices of conversations from the past. Their thoughts of interactions make their way into each cut. Their past makes its way into the chess piece, the spoon, the spindle, the art.
My red cedar was an external hard drive from South Africa. I had no idea what was on it. I didn’t know any of the numerous interview subjects thereupon. But that hard drive only existed because of how another person was moved to help tell the story of the plight of Great White Sharks. And he was informed from his time working with the nearly extinct Vaquita in Mexico. And he had footage because two women flew in from other countries to help him film. And they had success because of other volunteers who helped them along the way.
When it comes to who made what…the list just keeps expanding.
The art suffers when respect is not paid to the predecessors that came before. It’s loses the value when we drop into thinking it’s “ours”. And really the list is so long…all the moments that lead up to what we would call a finished product…that it can’t be calculated. Saying anything is “mine”, really, loses all meaning. I think we should just start saying, “we made this for us, because of us.”
This movie was needed and the time was right and I happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right team and support system.
What I can say accurately is that I crafted the movie on the timeline and that the only reason I was able to have the time to do so was because a friend, who believed in my work, died at a young age…and that friend had placed me in her Will. I received money from her settlement just as I was pondering how I could find a way to financially wrangle making this movie with my CoDirector. Before she died she specifically asked me to use the money for one of my conservation projects. And so I have. I made two projects actually…The Last Shark is the second one. Her contribution to this work is the only reason I was able to find the time to complete the movie at all. Her money funded my entire living costs from May of 2023 to this very day…December 12, 2023.
Today finds me on one of my last nights at yet another housesitting gig. Northern Vermont. A cute but modern log cabin in the Northern woods. The power went out today due to a winter storm. I had nothing but silence and the wood burning stove to keep me company. And mostly what I thought about was how long it’s taken me in life to stop taking full credit for the things that I have accomplished. Taking credit is an interesting thing. At some points in our early years it’s critical to not make ourselves small and taking credit is part of seeing our own value. But at the ripe age of 52, something I am very grateful for is following the threads to all the things that lead to a good thing in the world and realizing that all credit actually starts in the past and moves forward into the future. Getting to be a part of something as positive as The Last Shark documentary has been an immense honor. But I am just a part of it. I feel like it is one of those rare things one gets to do only once or so in life. Where you know you got to be a part of something larger than yourself in an obvious way.
What I also learned is that you have to bring everyone into the room. That’s really important. Building community is what it’s going to take to tackle climate change, species loss, ending suffering. Tending to the contributions and sacrifices that others make to support the film is just as important as making the film.
I also am in the same cabin where I completed making the movie. The final exports happened here. And it’s also here and also today, two days before I change houses again…that I decided to exit the project.
This post is sort of my goodbye letter. I will still be wrapping up some loose ends but yeah…today marks the day I stepped out officially.
I make movies. And videos. That’s what I do. I love doing it. This movie premiered over a month ago now…and I realized today that though there is still plenty of work to do on outreach and more screenings and so forth…but my share of the work has already been completed.
For me, everything I had to give is there in the movie. Everything that I could give creatively, is in every single cut. And yes, I didn’t do it alone. People ask me, after seeing the movie “but what should we do now?” That’s the question…always. At the end of every screening of any movie I have been involved with that is the question. Because we are always talking about reversing the destruction of our home. It’s a good question. I personally don’t see a movie as having the answer. I see a movie as informing people to decide IF they want to do something about finding an answer. And I think that it starts with community and built of inspired individuals. That’s the whole reason I make movies. In hopes of informing and inspiring.
Leaving this project is a very tough decision. And it will take some disentangling for sure. But pointing to the fact that I haven’t had income for 6 months now…is I think reason enough for me to say that at some point-I simply have to find the exit. I have given up relationships, having a home, and I have gone through quite a lot of my savings.
I will really miss working with my CoDirector, Frankie. We have had a WILD ride. We have never met in real life. It’s all been virtual. And we began talking for the first time about this project on December 22, 2022.
I will say that this is my first time CoDirecting and HOLY SHIT…do not enter into that space lightly my friends. I can laugh when I say that now. But it’s a whole different thing than being a solo director and it will require a whole new skill set to make it through. Frankie and I managed it though. The movie exists as proof of how we were able to work together.
Frankie will continue moving on with the movie in South Africa and I wish her all the best with that. There are some big things in process that we hope will come to fruition in terms of getting the message out there.
The movie has created a lot of momentum and I truly hope that people even are moved to protest peacefully and find ways to lobby the government to get the nets out. And finally I hope that the movie makes its way around the globe so that more people can learn to love sharks instead of only fearing them.
As for me…letting go of the day to day Last Shark comms will be a new experience. This has been my full time job for so long now. I don’t know what I will do next…besides hopefully find some paid work to refill the coffers. I will leave this lovely cabin in two days. Then kick around VT for about a week. Then head to visit my adult kids for Christmas. Then it’s off to Chicago for housesitting gig for 8 days. Hmmm New Years Eve in Chicago? lol…should be interesting!
Then I am back to the shores of Lake Champlain in VT, in Burlington for my next housesitting gig for two months. After that…? Well, I have been trying to make time to go to volunteer in Ukraine for this non profit that I run social media for. I am hoping to fit that in before Summer. And then I am looking at moving to live near my kids in the Midwest.
So that’s it really. I am just so grateful for everyone that made this movie exist. Thrilled that I got to play a role in The Last Shark. I am glad to see that so many people care about the planet after all.
CoDirector of The Last Shark signing off! 🙂
Here is a pic of me reading in the cozy cabin before typing this up…
The Last Shark is my fourth feature length enviro documentary film. And I have to say that whenever an article comes out, about a film, they always misquote some important truth or bungle a statistic.
But in this case I feel like the Daily Maverick did an excellent job. A very well reported article. I still do think that interviewing the folks who have the job of capturing and killing sharks…and asking them what they think about shark conservation, is sort of missing the point…but I get that the reporters need to create the “balanced” viewpoints.
All in all, a very good article. Well done. Click photo to read full article:
Things are moving fast. It’s been that way from start. Frankie and I got the hard drive in June of 2023. It had all the files from filming in 2021. For more on that backstory check HERE.
Since then it’s been what we call a “sprinting marathon” to finish the movie by November, for a Premiere in Capetown, South Africa. Tonight I watched the final 10 minutes of the movie’s fourth screening via our narrator’s whatsapp video stream…along with the audience at The Commons in Muizenberg. I was able to see how absolutely riveted and focussed the audience was on the movie. For a venue that serves also as a bar and restaurant, the place was surprisingly absent of all cross chatter. I got to watch Jake (one of our two social media interns) working the merch table, slinging our logo T-shirts, stickers and baseball hats. Ariel, our narrator’s young daughter, even held court at the end of the movie, holding hands with Frankie front and center and helped Frankie make the closing remarks and start a lenghty Q&A session with the audience. Below is a pic of Candice and Kholo, who totally knocked it out of the park with helping us get everything ready at The Commons. Kholo is their tech and sound guy and Candice managed all the other details so fricking well. It was a pleasure working with them.
Frankie and I have now very different roles that we weren’t expecting. She has to work hard to stay on track and lively and well rested while on tour – similar to being in a band. Her task is about 10 times larger than we thought it would be. Originally we thought we would have perhaps 3 screenings in all of South Africa. There’s now many more than that. We just had no idea how much energy and enthusiasm there would be for this story to be told. Her schedule is packed. She’s being contacted by different interests internationally. It’s sort of surreal for both of us.
As the CoDirector, I can’t say its easy being so far away from the action of the screenings. I absolutely wish it had been realistic for both of us to fly over to SA financially and logistically. But things in life have a habit of work out interestingly. I have jumped into new roles.
I am helping to organize the tech situation at each venue before Frankie arrives so that everything goes smoothly. As of this moment, from Nov 7-December 12 there are 16 scheduled screenings. That means getting up at 5 AM, since by then it’s already noon over there-to work things out at each different venue via whatsapp and email. For example, right now it’s 2:30 PM here in the USA and I have only just now stopped “working” for the first time since before 7 AM. I should probably eat something now!
My other role is to look forward to other screenings around the world outside of South Africa. Chatting with shark conservationists where I can find them and seeing if they would like to host screenings once the tour in South Africa is over in mid December. If all goes according to plan…I would travel with the film beginning in January hitting venues in countries and building international support for removing the nets and transforming the Sharks Board. Frankie’s plan is to stay in South Africa and work on continuing educational projects on this topic.
We feel like with this approach we are giving the sharks the best chance for having this message be heard: No more shark nets.
Meanwhile, back in SA…tomorrow nigt we have another screening that sold out at a venue called Jack Black. The venue was so kind to us! They offered to open up another space for viewing and allowed 30 additional people to see the movie. That brings up the total to around 150 viewers for that one showing.
And as always both Frankie and I have our ears open for any hint of funding to help keep this whole thing moving forward. The Gofundme has helped but we are back down to our personal funds once again.
Any Angel donors out there want to help fund this important work? 🙂
Feeling so proud today!! Because this amazing article just got sent my way from Kim Sharklady Maclean. She’s in the movie and her company Sharklady Adventures is one of our collaborators. The presentation in this paper is just so well done and pleasing to the eye.
And I love it that they dropped in the entire full sized poster from our graphics guy Ben Wiid.
Yesterday Frankie and I were interviewed on a really fascinating show called The Daily Jaws. Ross is the host of the show and I gotta say it is not what we expected. It was just so lovely and fascinating to be interviewed about shark conservation…on a show that get its namesake from their love of the JAWS movie. Fun full circles.
Okay well this is a very strange feeling. I woke up with the same mindset I have had for the last 5 months. Which, in essence, was something like this: “GO GO GO CREATE CREATE CREATE AND DON’T FORGET TO EAT NOW AND THEN” And that’s been my life while making The Last Shark. To the exclusion of all else, that’s what it took to make it. And yesterday at approximately 9 AM…I finished making it. I sent it via WeTransfer to the Premiere venue in Capetown for conversion and testing on their sound system. But I was so exhausted and worn out by then…there were still so many things to organize that I didn’t even clock that moment as significant. I sent the 9 GB file from a friend’s house because they have a fiber internet connection. My friend’s took one look at me and said “you look haggard”. Frankie and I didn’t even take the time to celebrate or talk about the fact that the finish line had been crossed. That’s how busy things have been with lining up screenings.
I took an afternoon nap because I couldn’t stay awake any longer…I woke up and worked until 10 on screenings logistics.
Now here I am. In bed. In Vermont. And I just had a call with Frankie, in South Africa where I realized that there’s really nothing left for me to create. And…now it’s hitting me. I did cross the finish line. It’s done. She has about 16 screenings that she is personally attending and speaking at there. Her work is far from done. But my work of crafting that film, of Directing and scripting and shaping and living on that timeline…it’s completely over. Wow. I have been carrying my role in this project for a year and just like that, it’s done.
I literally have no idea what to do with myself now. How strange. Making a movie has got to be one of the strangest of endeavors.
A poet once wrote “there is more truth in the ashes, than in the standing house”. They meant that only what is true remains, after something intense occurs, like a housefire. And in the case of their poem, the context was that the family remained…even though the house no longer did.
Today at around 4 PM, after tackling some unexpected website issues, instead of editing the movie The Last Shark-I just stoked the woodburning stove, laid down in front of it like a dog and slept for two hours.
I had just received the final version of the Original Sound Track (OST) emailed from California from our composers. Earlier in the day I had received a long awaited piece of footage from South Africa featuring the deployment of exclusion nets on a beach there. These were the literal last two pieces of this documentary puzzle to be fitted.
I knew I had everything I needed to finish this project that has consumed my life since June 1, 2023. I wasn’t ready to just finish it without some kind of ritual. So…sleeping in front of the fire, in this secluded log cabin in the Vermont woods, was my way of approaching that. Because…how do you just finish something you have put so much of yourself into? You know? We live in a society with so few rituals to mark the milestones. I like to build them into my life as often as I can. Writing is one of them. And taking time to breathe, be and appreciate what has come before, is important for me to do, before I finish something.
This cabin is so fricking peaceful. I am at the base of mountains. Snow is on the ground. I can sing at the top of my lungs, as badly as I want…no problem. And I have been here before. I stayed here in March of this year. Back when Frankie (my Co-Director for The Last Shark) and I still didn’t even have the files yet from South Africa. Back when we had no idea what we were in for. I love a full circle and so being here is one of them. What has happened since March, is worth thinking about. And honestly, it’s been so busy I haven’t had much time to do that.
Since I left this house, I have done housesitting gigs or stayed with friends -while working on this movie in:
Burlington VT Underhill, VT Montpelier VT Va Beach VA Charlottesville VA Chapel Hill NC Palm Harbor FL Carrboro NC Wolfeboro NH Bryson City NC
Wow. I have never made that list. No wonder I am SO tired of moving around lol. Geez. 10 locations in 8 months. Some of these locations are just a blur. All I can picture is my workstation config, where the transcripts sat on a table and the view out the window. Some places were essential. VA Beach and Palm Harbor were essentially on the ocean. I picked those places so that I could find inspiration for the movie-since it’s ocean specific. And those places really delivered it in spades. I went to the beach at least 30 times for swimming and sunset watching this summer and it was so needed.
I stayed and visited with a lot of friends. And I am more grateful for community and friendship than I ever have been. My sense of geography and spaces between places has compressed. Driving up and down the East Coast of the USA is now not even a “thing”. It’s like running to the grocery store.
Staying with this project for free meant turning down paid work, meant running down my savings account, meant risking everything financially. One major car repair, and no housing, would have meant disaster. If I had been injured, I would have had nowhere to stay and recuperate. I just can’t say enough about how much my life had to change in order for this movie to be made.
A friend of mine died last year. She was a close enough friend that I officiated her funeral in late 2022. She died young. Glioblastoma. She died about 5 months after diagnosis. Her name was Teala and though we argued about how she had included me in her Will…I am forever grateful to her for insisting on doing so.
This entire project, my side of it as Editor and Co Director…unfunded as it has been, was only possible because of her. She literally said to me “if you are uncomfortable with the fact that I am giving you money, then donate it to a charity OR why not use it for one of those movie projects about saving the planet that you never seem to have funding for?”
For me this is really the movie that Teala made happen. Without her help it would have taken another full year for me to afford to find the free time to work on this, while working full time on other paid gigs. That being said…using Teala’s money has been difficult for me to do. I would have only used it for something that felt crucial, impactful and life changing. So I have had to reevaluate all along if this was the right project to meet that standard. It has. Also how weird is it that this project would come into my life nearly the same month that I first met Frankie when she told me that there wasn’t any money to pay an Editor. I got the check from Teala and I could hear her wishes…and here we are now, nearly done.
Yes, her name is in the credits.
I thought about her everyday that I have worked on this movie. The connectedness of all things, even really hard things, is difficult to reconcile, when they also result in something overwhelmingly positive.
Frankie and I have been making a movie. That’s a statement of fact. But the movie started making its own way in the world, as in idea, long before the film existed. After all…I am the Editor, I would know…the movie isn’t even finished yet and people are already experiencing positive vibes because of it. More than any other film I have worked on; the interest, positivity, connections, and passion for the film have been building out before the movie has been seen. A phrase that Frankie and I hear so often is “being a part of this has uplifted me”. People talk about coming out of a hard time and feeling fired up again as they have joined the effort as collaborators and supporters. It has felt more like a movement, than just a movie. It’s just been so insanely positive and we’ve had to really take a lot of deep breaths. Because working on something that isn’t technically done yet…that’s already having an impact…means you really better deliver. And in my role, that’s just been like…yeah, sometimes that’s been really a wild experience to wonder if I will get it right. What kept Frankie and I feeling like we were on that right track was back when we showed some beta viewers the very first rough cut (and I mean it was ROUGH)…they cried. That was the first time we realized we had possibly stumbled across something unique. But I can’t stress enough that it didn’t feel like we made something. It felt like we found something that was there, just waiting to be discovered.
I want to talk about fire. Sleeping next to the woodburning stove made me think about how fire is so much a part of the creative process. What burns away is as important as what remains. To create something that deals so closely with such hard topics: death, species loss, extinction, the fear of humanity…this movie has been very hard to face. To tell this truth I have had to stay close to it, really close to it. Like-method actor close. It became common for me to be on the timeline in my dreams, moving between clips, looking at footage. I have lived and breathed and put myself into the experience from the shark’s perspective, into the perspective of any poor creature caught in nets that literally only exist due to humanity’s fear. We kill animals for all sorts of reasons. But this is the first time I have spent time so close to a topic where we are eliminating a species solely due to our fear. And that’s had a huge impact on me. So for me, making the movie is the fire and what remains is a hard truth about us. We are still largely driven by our fears. And we must figure that out.
I feel like this movie is so timely for that reason. I think we have made something that doesn’t blame anyone. To me, what we have made is a different way of looking at the human story. The one where we forgot, that we live in home, where we aren’t the only one’s there.
Art wants to happen. My mom was an artist. While taking care of her as her full time nurse in 2020, when she was dying from cancer, she did a TON of art. It’s this invisible thing that needs a voice and it needs someone to listen to it and shape it into something others can see. She did that well. So yeah…I am deeply grateful that I was able to take the last 5 months (the most intense editing months out of the year since the project began anew) and just focus on what what the story was, what it was trying to say. There were times when I was laying on the floor surrounded by scattered transcripts from about 17 different interview subjects and feeling like I was never going to be able to find the story that I knew was in here somewhere. Art takes time. And patience. And listening. Mom would have really loved this movie. Anyway…yeah…I think I am ready to do this thing.
It’s time to load in the OST onto the timeline in Premiere Pro and adjust the sound levels. I will drop in the Exclusion Net footage. I have some additional color grading on some underwater footage. But it’s pretty much there really. By this time tomorrow the movie will be done.
Wow and woah and here we go…thanks Teala. Thanks Mom. Thanks Frankie. Let’s do this thing.
I arrived last Sunday to stay with friends in Wolfeboro. A lovely and quaint summer resort town that bills itself as America’s Original Summer Resort. On the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, this is a town with no traffic lights, no fast food restaurants and postcard classic charm. It’s also probably the least socially diverse town I have visited during my 5 month tour of the eastern USA. But still, it is a visually stunning place. Staying with friends, after so many months of doing housesitting gigs in places I did not have any friends, has been amazing. Watching parents raise kids again and hearing all the conversations I used to have with my kids was wonderful and grounding.
I had planned on having the movie done before I got here. I wasn’t going to using my guest room as The Last Shark Movie Making HQ. But that’s how it went. I would work all day while my friends and their kids did their day to day lives of work and school. I would try to stop when they were home in the evenings, which was hard to do, with so much work still to do.
Where am I on the work? Hmmm….when I arrived I had done zero work on audio levels. I had done zero work on color grading.
Normally sound and color I would farm out to someone else. I know where my strengths are and these are not mine. But with a budget of essentially zero dollars…I kind of knew that these tasks would eventually land in my lap.
I had been looking at this movie for so long in its “as is” condition…viewing the footage and audio as originally captured, for so many months that my eye and ear had become accustomed to how things looked and sounded in our selected clips. Until I reached this point of making the movie, I had no idea how much help the look and sound needed. Also I have never been one to do much with sound or color grading for video. I have never had to really. I have always captured my own and therefore was controlling the quality of both so I didn’t have to do much in post production. But also, I just never have learned color grading. This movie also is the first that I have tackled that has underwater footage-a whole different kettle of fish. So in my time here the movie has gone through a huge transformation. Here the movie hit the long awaited “picturelock” milestone. Which also means timelock. Which means that the composers can now do their work second by second for each scene. The movie also locked in all the final narration. With those two pieces finally in place, we had a movie…just with wildly divergent lighting and visual elements and sound levels all over the place. Also…no OST or music yet.
As I leave today we now have a movie that has much improved color grading. I can’t claim to be great at this task. But when I drag the opacity slider down on the adjustment layers for comparison it’s rather astonishing at how much good color was hiding in those clips. The movie looks so much better now it’s honestly hard to believe. How much you can do with any clip all depends on how it was shot. If it’s overexposed in the pre you can’t do a full rescue in post. In all of these outdoor interview shots the sun was playing hide and seek with the clouds. The interviews also lasted long enough that the sun shifted quite a lot. This would be challenging for any Director of Photography to contend with. So for me, in post…it is what it is. For a first time color grader it’s been daunting to achieve any kind of visual consistency with those conditions. The name of the game is “I can only do my best”. So it’s both satisfying to improve the looks and also there are many moments where I am just like “WTF!!!??? I can’t do this!!!” There is a reason you hire the experts lol.
I am not yet done with the full grading. I would say I am about 75% done with the first pass. Then I will rewatch the export and just keep refining over and over right up until the Premiere date on November 7th. But overall I would say the movie literally looks 60% better already. And that’s a really good place to be. It’s a 1 hour and 21 minute movie and I have probably put over 20 hours into grading.
And as for the sound….wow. I am also not a sound mixer. Never have been. In that area things were much easier. Once I got the hang of things I was able to fly. I probably did 20 hours of sound. The sound is like 90% better than it was as received on the hard drive. Sometimes the voices, once repaired, were so rich and deep that I nearly cried. I had no idea how much good audio was hiding. And the reason it’s emotional is because I have put everything into this movie- the message is so important. Hearing the voices sound so good means the message gets across so much more powerfully.
That’s my story. I am truly so very exhausted. I am glad to be here with good friends but still…the final editing process of sound and color has been taxing and isolating and man…after 5 months of this I am definitely nearing the end of my ability to work without any kind of real breaks or time off from staring at screens. I only have to last until about November 5th.
Today I have what will be the second to last meeting with the composers and with the co director on the music being created. I am really looking forward to that. Dropping in their final OST will be a really huge and nearly final move to the work. Then it’s off to the next house. Vermont. Staying with good friends again. I probably won’t get much work done at their house unfortunately. I will mostly review the film many times and make notes of what to tweak.
And then we come to the final house. A mountain cabin in Bolton Valley VT. That’s where this I will have 5 final days, Nov 1-Nov 5, to finish everything that I can before the Premiere. My plan is to just work around the clock, once more, to march out onto the timeline and get the movie made. After that all I can say is that I did my best under the circumstances as a full time volunteer for half a year. If you can’t tell from my tone, yeah…I am beat. I can still rally and I do but yeah…wow…I am tired.
At least yesterday I did force myself to take a small break. My friend here convinced me I needed one, which obviously I do. I hopped onto a paddleboard and she in a kayak and we spent 3 hours floating around on a gorgeous NH lake. The wind would rise and a school of golden leaves would swim through the air around us, shimmering in the dappled light. At one point I just laid down on my back on the board and let it all go. It was a good time. Then I went back to the house and worked til midnight.
And because I have now color graded I have to say no…I did not color correct this snap that Julie took LOL. But yep. that’s me playing around with crossbow strokes and sculling away for fun.
The Video Slab 