Summer Broken

Musing Outloud about Overcoming Setbacks

I’ll just tell you what happened.

Monday and Tuesday were my days for shooting and editing the video I was putting together for this STSC Symposium. The video’s working title is Heat Wave. I am making a movie about a heat wave.

I was making it during a heat wave.

I think it’s gonna turn out to be a pretty rad video. Look at this still I grabbed from it:

This image is overexposed, and I couldn’t be happier with how it looks. I had a decision to make between purposefully over-exposing the shots in-camera, or pushing the whites in post. I decided to do the risk of the in-camera effects, and the shots came out exactly how I wanted.

In fact, many shots are “underexposed” relative to what I was trying to do, because I was worried about overdoing it and pulled back. Those pulled-back shots I tested by pushing the whites and pulling the blacks, and with a bit of color correction they can match the other shots.

I’m proud of the intuition I held while shooting this short. I’m going for something aesthetically ugly, so the ‘mistakes’ have to look right — they have to be the correct mistakes. In the past I would have needed a couple of camera tests, but for this I snapped on the 24mm lens, threw a frost filter over it, put the picture profile to ‘Clear’ (this adds contrast and clarity at the expense of roll-off and saturation, but I don’t want the saturation and the frost fixes the roll-off), and trooped around LIC grabbing angles I liked without having any good way to view it in the brightness and heat. Still I got the shots.

So the first layer of imagery works. There’s a second layer I need to build that is going to look something like a vignette, but animated. It is supposed to represent cataracts.

And there’s the story. Heat Wave is about a former surfer who had an accident that nearly blinded him, after which he started to have paranoid attacks that microscopic imps that live in light beams are attacking his vision, and that there is a conspiracy by the wealthy and powerful to feed the imps by baking the streets with light from the glass towers they build.

Obviously, you’re not viewing that very video right now because something went wrong.

As of writing, I can’t get the Premiere timeline to playback (and no, please don’t send me suggestions to fix it. Clear cache, restart computer, update Premiere, toggle GPU encoding, copy the project assets into a new project file, yadda yadda. I tend to be the guy people come to with these issues). I think it has to do with the audio VO file being corrupted, and I’ll just recompress it. I’ll figure it out in another editing session or two, but I won’t have the video done in time for the Symposium, so you get this update instead.

However, it’s not sufficient for me to merely send an apologia for unfinished work and grin and say, “See? Metanarrative! Still delivered a, uh, Summer theme. Uh, like as ‘Summer Break.’ Haha. My laptop and me took a break!” I had to think about what to give the Symposium instead, and I considered a few things like reworking the video’s narration into a short story (not medium appropriate), writing a poem? (don’t like idea of pretending a poem is a one-off quick fix solution for missing projects), writing a poem about an overheated computer?? (meta, haha), or writing a new short story, which my brain, as overheated as my computer, stolidly refused as an option (I can’t argue with my brain. It always knows what I’m thinking, and can’t see the flaws in its own thinking).

Instead, in the spirit of the topic of Summer and grabbing onto the meta-haha of Summer break, there is something, haha, about my creative workload right now, haha, that feels broken.