A Painful Step Forward

I completed the conversion of the images I captured for “Contingency” into video files this week. It really was painful.

I got about half the images done the week before. For some reason, the last half took more time. I found the technique of overlaying a negative of one image worked well. It was easy to tell when I had a frame aligned properly. By the end, I got pretty good at it. Nevertheless, with well over a thousand images to adjust, it took a long time.

I didn’t notice it before, but this week I found the work was painful. I had to sit in the same position for hours while I made very precise changes with my mouse. That gave me repetitive strain injuries. I had my arm all tensed up at the same time, which created pain as well.

They say that an artist must suffer for their art.

One of the things that surprised me about filmmaking was how physical the work was. Even if you are the director, you are up and about all the time, even if you don’t do any of the heavy lifting.

1 Comment

  1. Once when I was on a shoot, a large HMI tipped and severed my foot. It was very painful. There was a lot of blood (grips refused to clean it up even though their carelessness led to the light falling), but despite the pain, I kept on with the directing. Someone gave me a bungee cord to step the blood. If only that was all that happened. A piece of glass from the fresnel shattered and took a chunk out of my hand when it flew up. I now have only two fingers on my right hand and they are the wrong ones. That was also very painful. S don’t talk to me about the pain of art, buck-o. I know pain! And then there was the time my athletes foot got out of control on my one good foot. You don’t want to go through that let me tell you.

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