DREAMFARM

I am putting this out into the universe -- do guy editors suffer postpartum depression? Let me explain -- you put your heart and soul into making something good, beautiful, poetic, creative, inspired, possibly fun and it just ends. You pack up your toys, you thank your clients, you hope they thank you and you go away. Now I admit this is the life of a free-lancer or consultant, (whatever you want to call it), and it is expected. You have been doing it this way for 30 years, but you still don't get over it. A staff person sees everyone they have worked with on Monday morning, but anyone who works on a film crew, as a sound mixer or on an editorial staff knows, when the job is done -- you are done. How do you feel after you have given birth to your film? I read a lot of postings on various industry blog sites, but they are all about critical mass technical emergencies. Not about the serious steam-blowing ranting of a stressed out human being (doing), who has stared at ...

If you haven't heard already THE HURT LOCKER is a 2009 American war thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Hello, Oscar nominations -- you heard it here first! Ok, I admit I like the fact that it is a woman director directing a war movie. Sorry, guys, women can blown things up too. Shot in Jordan, the film is based on recently declassified information about a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) (bomb squad) team in present day Iraq. From Indiana Jones to Iraq, Jordan is one of those places that sets up well on the big screen. Dusty, exotic, stark and threatening -- the perfect heated background for suspense. THE HURT LOCKER is written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded within an actual bomb squad. Now this is where it gets interesting. The director and the editor take you, not only inside your character's mind, but his visual and visceral movements. "When you see it, you're gonna feel like you've been in war", is a quote from th...

I didn't come up with the coinage "cocaine to Rogaine" , but it seems to define a certain period in the mid-eighties, when editing was wild and crazy fun. And now we look back and tell war stories about those "good old days". Yes, it used to be fun. We were young and on fire. Video was a new medium -- MTV was king and Michael Jackson's videos were mini-sojourns into a magic merging of music and storytelling. And everyone wanted to do video art. Or a music video. At that time the newest techo box to come out was the ADO -- which faked a 3D cube which you could place moving video into. And it spun around or sailed across the screen in a layered effect. Hours of fun... The device that had a small screen with green formatting type that you had to toggle through with a joystick to set up an impressive X and Y axis of spins and twirls. Whoa. Do that again! But really, the biggest advantage was the industrial plastic casing on the box. It had hori...