Somewhere over the Rainbow

Been doing the video editing late shift tag-team with Mike all this week. We've been editing the eulogy video for Helen's memorial tomorrow. I think it's going to be really good.

We've been madly scanning in their collection of KDP protest photos and other pictures. There are a couple of other Bautistas working on the project as well. As Lillian said, Bautistas seem overly represented. One was on of Helen's former students who just happened to have done an oral history interview with her 3 years ago. She talks about how she came into being an community activist, the highlights of those years, and in the end, what she would like to pass on to other activists and the next generation.

Video work takes a lot of concentration, so me and Mike trade whenever the other's brain is thoroughly fried. In between, we pop in a tape of Ken Burns' video on Frank Lloyd Wright. We figure if we need ideas, we might as well steal from the master. If anything in life, be a good thief, with high tastes. We study how he lingers on a still photo while several voices filter in and out, how he pans a shot or quick cut zooms, how the mood of the piano changes depending on the emotion. We study his timing, his flow. In addition we find out Frank Lloyd Wright was quite the "playa" with a dramatic highs and lows love life who rarely apologized for who he was and how he did it and somewhere in that life was architecture genius.

Lillian wrote the narration. Abe helps us figure out which pictures go with what era. We laugh at our "maniacle power" to "change history" depending on how we slice it all together. Was KDP really the center of the anti-marcos movement in America? And no, we couldn't find a picture for that place, but doesn't it look like they could have been standing right there? But it's true, history and our view of it is controlled by the storyteller, which makes it all the more important for as many people to tell their version. I realized too that whether it is writing, or theater, or film, or kali, in the end, I just like telling a good story. Not necessarily a narrative one, but still taking the audience on a journey.

iLife suite from Apple is simply awesome. We've used every product. And it's amazingly powerful how just about anyone has the ability to create movies from relatively "free" software.

We're down to the wire now. Over instant messaging last night we asked a friend in the Philippines to provide an entire section of photos. Thank you the Internet. At times we run delirious and can't even remember where the mouse clicked anymore. There are moments of humor in things that you've watched over dozens of times. The way the narrator arTICulates words, or a rolling closeup to emphasize the "way we were" will send us into rolling giggles.

There are moments during it all when I miss Helen. But I'm glad that we're getting a chance to tell her story to people who knew her and give them glimpses of other parts of her life and perhaps also to those who didn't know her and only knew of her.