After watching a TED talk Diana Nyad gave about her journey successfully swimming in shark infested waters from Cuba to Florida at age 64 after four failed attempts since age 28, the line that resonated for me was one she shouted at the audience as she walked off the stage, “Find a way!” So here are five examples that stand out in my mind of how I “found a way” when a challenge was brought to me.
When I started dating my wife, she had just finished her first year teaching music and with that enthusiasm and energy, she was always brimming with ideas to reach her students and how to make the concerts a more enjoyable experience. Her ideas were supported by her chairperson, not always by her colleagues, so she had to make her more elaborate ideas happen on her own to keep the peace in her department. So when she wanted to do a condensed version of “Beauty and the Beast” with her Junior band, she turned to me to help with the more challenging props. I was able to create Lumiere’s hands from plastic flower pots with a flashlight inside connected to a translucent plastic carrot for the flame lined with aluminum foil inside to reflect the light. Chip was created with a large plastic flower pot with a hole cut out for the face and cardboard covered with a tablecloth to simulate a table his head would rest on. The actor sat on wheels so he could be rolled on and off stage. But my favorite effect was the Enchanted Rose. Getting an artificial rose and the case was easy, but how to make it glow? I used a large box covered with a lace tablecloth with a hole cut the size of the glass case and covered with a red lighting gel with a scoop work light inside the box shining up. It’s a subtle effect, but really created a presence in the auditorium which served the telling of the story well.
My work with IEEE.tv mainly focused on profile videos for oral histories and awards, but there was also a focus at the time to introduce engineering to grade school students. One video had biomedical engineering students teaching basic principles and I had to make it fun to watch with animations and graphics. As I was editing, I noticed a mistake was made when explaining an atom. Instead of Neutrons, the instructor said Neurons. I couldn’t believe no one else who reviewed the footage missed this! There was no time to get a recording of him saying Neutrons and it would never match with his speech in the video. So I had to go through the entire lecture and find every place he said “neu” and “trons” hoping I could find the right inflection. Luckily, he used the word “neutral” and said “electrons” a number of times so I had choices.
The next educational outreach was a partnership with Tryengineering.com to do a series of engineer profiles called “Careers with Impact.” The first video profiled Gertjan van Stam; an engineer who brought the internet to rural areas of Zambia. All I had to work with was brief interview footage with some b-roll of him lecturing and working on his laptop. I was promised footage from a Dutch documentary about him, but it never arrived and the deadline was approaching. I was then given access to his Picasa account which had thousands of photos chronicling his work there. I knew a slideshow was not going to hold the interest of school children. So I took it a step further and separated elements within the photos and animated them. It’s similar to a process gaining great popularity now called parallax or 2.5 D. It was a very time consuming process, but in the end it was fun to watch and I received a Telly Award for it.
One afternoon in a conversation with my son’s Sensei in Aikido, he learned I was a Cinematic Craftsman and asked if I could pull off shooting an idea he had for his website. He envisioned a point of view shot of entering his Dojo from the street with the doors opening on their own and as you enter, the screen doors open to reveal the mat. Northern Blvd, where the dojo is located, is always busy with traffic. There was no way I could start from across the street to get the whole building, cross four lanes, have two people be far enough off camera to pull the doors open in unison with wires just before I enter , then have the screens slide open in unison before I would enter the mat. I would need a permit and police to stop traffic to pull the shot off. But there was also no budget to make these things happen. So I thought for a minute, and not wanting to say no to a Sensei, I told him I could do it with stills. He couldn’t follow how I would do it, so I said, “Trust me” and hoped I could figure it out.
With a tripod, I took 4 rows of 36 pictures across the dojo to get every inch overlapped from ceiling to floor, wall to wall. I then took pictures of the screens and front doors closed. In Photoshop, I stitched all the pictures together to make a panorama of the dojo and animated the doors and screens to open while passing through layers of the exterior and interior of the dojo.
My final example is my absolute favorite because I felt I reached a new level of skill when I was able to create this image. I was approached by an old collegaue of my wife’s who had just become Principal of Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn. She’s forward thinking and wanted to bring the school in a new direction. One of her priorities was having a video for open house to display the deep history and traditions of the school as well as its ambitions to grow with the future of education. In our meetings, she expressed how she wanted it to be different from other school videos. When I learned about the tradition of Senior Sunrise, where the Senior class on the first day of school goes to the Verrazano Bridge ( a block away from the school) and watches the dawn of their last year at Fontbonne together, I knew I had my beginning. I found the perfect music and saw the opening shot so clearly in my mind, that I had to get that shot. But there was a problem. The shot in my mind has the sun rising through the cables of the bridge and everywhere I researched, I could not find the sun ever rising anywhere near the bridge. Could I change the laws of nature and make it look the way I envisioned? After purchasing a high resolution photo of the bridge and spending ten hours carefully cutting out the background, then searching for stock video of water running under a bridge, the perfect colored sky and a rising sun, then layered them into one shot, I made nature bend to my creative will. The first time I ran it with the music, I was so overcome with emotion it made me tear up. It looked exactly as I envisioned it and I made it real!
Never again can I say anything is absolutely impossible. Going back to part one of this series, that’s why I can so nonchalntly say yes to adding a flying cork coming out of a champagne bottle. . . because I can and always will find a way.
[fbcomments]
