Unfiltered // May 2024
Scripts, birthdays, and a preview of my USJ video
Unfiltered is a quick study of the latest short I’m working on. It’s a behind-the-scenes of my work-in-progress. Inspirations, the idea I’m trying to capture, maybe even the rough script I’m playing with. It’s the process.
This is the fourth Unfiltered about my current work-in-progress. I was hoping I’d be sharing it by now but this is where I’m at:
I wrote my script and I started playing with the fragments I had collected since February. I recorded a VO. I re-recorded a VO. I cut it up and laid it on the footage.
I…didn’t like it. Something was off. What did I write? It feels alien.
I’ve learned not to panic at this stage because this has happened with my last 3 videos and it’s usually at the midway point. It’s when I need to take a step back and reassess what I’m trying to say with the edit. It may also mean I need to rewrite the script because I’m not where I was when I started with a nugget of an idea. It’s an inner whisper of, dig deeper and get raw because there’s still fear here.
Let’s hope “midway” doesn’t mean I’m 3 months from finishing this thing. If I don’t make some headway with it by June, it may be time to put it in the drawer and come back to it later.
On Saturday, I was in Bsous and the Bekaa. In Bsous, we met a bunch of fat silkworms who essentially eat white mulberry leaves their entire lives until they wrap themselves up in a gooey weighted blanket made of one single thread of silk. In silk production, the cocoons are boiled with the caterpillar alive inside so that the thread remains intact. That, or they’re allowed to emerge as flightless moths to mate, make hundreds of silk-making babies, and then they die. Because these blobs are such voracious eaters, we can only guess how much flora had to be uprooted to make room for mulberry (especially to keep up with Lebanon’s sericulture industry of the late 19th century).
I haven’t been up the mountain since September which feels weird to even type. I’d missed it more than I realized but it also made me miss running off to the South when Beirut was too hot and aggravating (as it’s starting to be this week). Going there was my equivalent to being “out of office” because I was unreachable. I didn’t need an excuse to be left alone for a weekend and now I’ve (temporarily, inshallah) lost my hideout.
I also went to a former colleague’s birthday party. It’s the second birthday in two months where I see the old crew from my advertising days and it’s been heartwarming to hear their encouragement on the work I’m doing. My former “big boss” gave me a vote of confidence and said I should “do a proper short” and my former producer - who’s now doing her own films - said, “I love what you’re doing. They’re not shorts, they’re essays. They’re the kind of things that should be shown in museums.” And then she advised that, because my writing is so good, my footage will always look good with it. She told me to focus on the image part more. I have felt this too. I told her about the USJ workshop and how it’s been challenging me to do just that.
THE USJ WORKSHOP: An update and a preview
The last two sessions got pushed to the end of May so the workshop went from being a condensed two-week thing to a stretched out six. You’d think that creating a very short video (a minute and a half) would be a piece of cake but it’s just as hard as attaching meaning to something triple the length.
Below is the rough cut of mine so far.