While the rest of the world was frolicking (or wilting) in the summer sun, I was locked away in a dark, hermetically sealed room deep in the recesses of AlphaCine.
Together with our brilliant colorist, Marc Brown, we tweaked, corrected and enhanced the color of every scene in the film. After multiple passes, we gradually brought the film’s color palette into alignment.
I was amazed to see just how much color influences your feelings about what your watching. Within a week, I’d learned a whole new language. I was able to talk about the mood and feeling I wanted each scene to evoke in terms of lighting and color. So cool!!!
Our film is now ready to project in HD, which is amazing given that we shot most of it in 2004…long before HD camcorders were an affordable household item.
Watching the finished film, it’s like a hazy film has been lifted. Our movie now feels even more intimate and immediate, with absolutely nothing standing between you and the images on the screen…
This past week has been incredibly trying. Eric and I went rounds about one final piece that he (and many others) felt needed to be included in the film. It’s a piece I felt reluctant to put in, because I didn’t understand where this need was coming from, and I couldn’t figure out how to ground what needed to be said in my own experience. So I was completely lost—writing like mad, grasping for anything that felt even remotely true. And then Eric called me out on it.
He called on Tuesday 6/29 and said, “Eli, we need have to have a heart to heart, because what you’re writing doesn’t feel like it’s coming from you.” We had a tough conversation, and examined this story we were telling, and what we needed to do to tell it more responsibly. And if we couldn’t say what needed to be said, we had to pull the heart of the film.
So I left Lucy with my friend Katie, headed home. I had 3 hours to salvage the last 10 months of this film’s journey. My friend Danica called, and with one story, she melted through my steely defensiveness. Crying, I sat and wrote, and the missing pieces of the film poured out onto the page. I recorded them, and sent them over to Eric.
3 days later, on 7/2, Eric and I cut in the final elements of the film, then watched it together. At 11:15pm, our bodies were crumbling, but our spirits were soaring. We declared the film Locked, and I caught the midnight ferry back to Seattle.
Of course, the road from “Locked Picture” to “Finished Film” is a significant one. We deliver the film on hard drives to AlphaCine and Bad Animals on 7/6. The week of the 12th is color correcting with Marc Brown, followed by a week of sound mixing with Dave Howe. Then we marry sweet sound with gorgeous picture, and (hopefully!) call it a wrap on July 23.
The U.S. currently lags behind several Western European countries in closing a legislative loophole banning the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) beyond its borders to protect U.S. citizens and residents. But this may soon change.
Some 6,000 girls endure FGM every day, totaling about 100 to 140 million girls and women who bear the lifetime consequences. The “Girls Protection Act” would make it illegal to transport a minor abroad for the purpose of FGM. Introduced by members of Congress Joseph Crowley and Mary Bono Mack as a bipartisan initiative, the bill is now awaiting review in a congressional committee.
Connie Burk (the NW Network Exec. Dir. and ALLY Exec. Producer) received an invitation to attend a White House reception in honor of GLBT Pride. And guess who she invited as her “plus one?” !!!?!?!?
Our whirlwind trip to DC was nothing short of amazing. Connie wrote a fabulous piece, detailing our adventures, complete with shoe drama, a recap of Obama’s address, and some impressive networking we squeezed in with senior White House officials. I will be writing a more detailed account of our White House soon…
We gifted a copy of A Lot Like You to President Obama, and were able to get a few extra copies into the hands of a long time domestic violence colleague of Connie’s—now the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. WOW!!!
While we were there, I popped my head into the White House movie theater. Very deluxe indeed. Hope to make it back there in the coming year for a private screening…
This past Thursday, we had the remarkable fortune of screening our most recent cut at EMP’s JBL Theater. ~150 people attended this fundraising event that was hosted by the NW Networkas part of National Coalition of Anti-Violence Project’s annual roundtable discussion. In 2003, the NW Network played a pivotal role in taking what could have been an ambitious home video project, and turning it into something Much Bigger. So partnering with the NW Network for this event felt like a fitting bookend for me.
After the screening, Connie Burk (NW Network’s Executive Director & ALLY’s Executive Producer) did a quick, yet compelling, ask for finishing funds. Then we had a Q&A session with the filmmaking team: Tom Kenney (producer/production manager), Eric Frith (editor/co-producer), Pete Droge (composer) and myself. The audience asked brilliant, thoughtful questions…a friendly warm up for what will hopefully be many more Q&As to come!
For folks who would like to contribute, please feel free to visit our online donation site. And if you like what you see, please share this link with your friends!!
FYI, our film is on schedule to be completed on July 23rd…only 6 years & 5 months after we boarded that first plane to Tanzania…
Holy Cow! It’s confirmed—we’ll be partnering with Marc Brown at Alpha Cine to get our video looking pretty enough to project in HD at film festivals and theaters around the world 😉 What a dream!!! Our creative team is truly unbelievable…
My brain is spinning. We finished our script rewrites, and so with our master script, we headed into Bad Animals to record the entire script, top to bottom. It was really hard to get through, both personally and professionally. But I think we now have a solid narrative foundation to build on.
We also just found out today that we have access to Vashon Theater for a screening this coming Saturday from 1:30-3:30. With only two days’ notice, Eric’s been cutting like a mad man, trying to get all our newly recorded voice over cut into the show, and finding footage to cover the entire film. An unbelievable amount of work to be churning out in such a short period of time.
Keep your fingers crossed that we’ve come a long way from where we were at our last screening!
This coming week, we have 2 magazine interviews—Global Woman tomorrow and Neo Black Cinema next Thursday. Will be sure to post links as soon as they’re available…
VIENNA, Feb 17, 2010 (IPS) – With hundreds of thousands of girls and women believed to be at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Europe, rights groups have mounted a campaign to get EU leaders to stop what they see as a barbaric and dangerous procedure.
FGM – an umbrella term for procedures involving partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons – has been condemned by governments, rights groups and health organisations across the world.
But while many European governments have introduced laws to ban the practice, campaigners have warned that far from dying out it continues in communities across the continent and those same governments must do more to stamp it out.
Wow!!!! We just signed on to have Bad Animalsdo our final sound editing and mixing. Dave Howe will be our engineer. I continue to be amazed at the incredible team we’re assembling to help us fully realize this film.
Melissa Curtin has been helping us research and secure the rights to various archival photos and video footage. We’re so grateful to have her tracking all this info.
The film is really coming into its own. Eric and I have been working solidly to piece the film back together. We’ve moved some scenes around, deleted some, added others back in, put in some new material. I’ve been knee deep in script rewrites, trying to string this new sequence together, while maintaining the depth, complexity, insight, and heart. Snap!
In September 2009, we had a Work-In-Progress test screening at NW Film Forum. While the audience felt it was a perfectly lovely film, they really pushed us to dig deeper—to get past “Seattle Nice” and reveal the truth, the core, the heart of our film.
This screening served as a wake up call for both Eric (Co-Producer/Editor) and I that the road ahead of us was going to be the hardest yet. Not only were we not as close to the finish line as we had thought. But this film was going to push us to confront the very hot spots we’d been avoiding.
Turns out, our audience could not have been more right. Once we opened up to the reality of what was right there in front of us, the story started to flow. Most of our scenes have remained the same. But we are completely overhauling the story’s point of view. After 5 years of fearing the well-worn pitfalls of first-person documentaries, I finally stepped into the role of storyteller.
So now my film journey is the story—where this film has pushed me to go, and what it brought up for me personally as a filmmaker, a mother, an activist.
Last month, I had the pleasure of talking about our film with Jeremy Richards on KUOW Presents) and Susan McCabe on Vashonia (pictured below.)
Vunjo Secondary School in our village of Mwika (Tanzania)
We will be donating a portion of our film’s proceeds to support the girls’ dormitory construction project at Vunjo Secondary School in our village of Mwika.
This project feels like an ideal match, given the themes of gender violence and girls’ lack of access to education that we explore in our film.
In Tanzania, students must successfully pass their “O-level exams” in order to proceed to the 9th grade. Consider the following research findings comparing the performance of girls who board at the school vs. girls who commute to school daily:
The pass rate of “boarding” girls = 100%
vs. The pass rate of “day” girls = 9%
Furthermore, more than 90% of girls who successfully entered the 9th grade,
and boarded at the school, went on to college!!
So the key to a girl’s educational success is in their ability to pass this critical exams.
Which is why we are actively supporting the construction of a new girls’ dorm. This is especially needed, given that girls’ enrollment has more than doubled since 2005; and this year, Vunjo had to turn away more than 70 girls due to lack of space.
Please join us in supporting these girls by creating the conditions they need in order to succeed!!!
