WHAT GRINDS MY GEARS/HIT LIST EDITION: iMovie, Facebook
Once upon a time, I aspired to do interesting things with the part of life most call a "career". No child dreams of sitting at a desk all day and putting conference calls on mute.
Certainly, kids who fall under the convenient umbrella category of "Underprivileged" may (I'm too lazy to hunt down 'scientific' proof, but as overpaid management consultants say, whatever supporting statistics you're looking for, they're out there somewhere) put more consideration into financial independence or even financial support for their family - from the parent(s)' point of view, the whole 'wanting your child to have a better life than you did'-concept. But even in this case - wherein an objective financial salary carries more weight than the subjective concept of a 'fulfilling' career - young ones (for better or worse) aspire to general celebrity status, whether that be in the form of a Hollywood actor, pro athlete, musician, or Silicon Valley-bro (I think they're considered celebrities, right?).
I was 'fortunate to have the opportunity' (air quotes to indicate overused phrasing tacitly reserved for use by only the privileged) to consider self-fulfillment and genuine enjoyment ahead of (or looking back, probably completely in lieu of) any financial consideration, which I say because my career goals fluctuated between novelist/writer, magazine editor (and this was BEFORE the whole Devil Wears Prada image brought a certain stereotype to life!), rock musician (with a band [as opposed to a solo act] wherein I could be the sturdy background-drummer, bassist, or perhaps the 'Guitar #2', i.e. a band member who secretly revels in the unspoken necessity of their underappreciated talent as a way of filling the sting of self-consciousness exacerbated by the charismatic yet less technically talented lead singer/guitarist/face of the band), screenwriter (this is how I guessed that money probably played no role in my career choices at the time), or 'filmmaker' (still not quite sure what exactly this entails - director? producer? cameraman? aren't they all technically responsible for 'making' the 'film', i.e. being a 'filmmaker'?). Sorry for subjecting you (fictional reader) to heavy-handed parentheticals. It's another bad habit of mine which, like being thirty minutes late to everything, has not gone away with time or repeated chiding.
With regards to this last option - to me, it basically meant that I enjoyed filming on a camcorder, cutting and splicing my 'footage' on home editing software, carefully selecting a soundtrack (which would be very illegally downloaded from Kazaa or WinMix, naturally) and adding effects like realistic-looking credits (I made up names to avoid naming myself as everything, which I was), non-cheesy transitions (fades ONLY!), and even some music video-style bpm syncing with cut shots, if the music was a particularly integral part of the film (i.e. if I really liked the song).
I was actually pretty good about developing this talent and seeing it through far enough to seriously consider attending what I now see as a very strange arts high school in Chicago, where I was allowed to spend a day shadowing a current student in the film department and attend her classes and studio time. The classes, of course, were a joke - I remember feeling incredibly sorry for the poor French teacher, who, despite being actually French (my French teacher at the time was an American Francophile, as many French teachers seem to be) could barely keep a class of poets, dancers, musicians, and would-be Tarantinos under control enough to review elementary concepts like present-tense verb conjugations. In a combination of pity and self-pride, I actually had the nerve to raise my hand and participate more than any of the actual students in the class, avoiding awkward silences following a question to the class but admittedly stroking my own ego and showing off a bit, unaware that no one gave a fuck. I felt equally superior in the math class (though I was less obnoxious) but even I had the sense to know that a school this awful in a traditional academic sense must be stellar in the, well, untraditional sense.
Unlike the high school I would actually eventually attend - where we were in "serious class" all day, every day, from 8 AM to 3 PM (well, 8:30 to 3 for me, since I was always late - a habit which has sadly not changed) - the majority of the art students' days were spent, unsurprisingly, working on their art. The film program was small (a dozen students or so), yet occupied an entire subterranean concrete-and-glass-paneled basement filled with professional-grade camera equipment, top-of-the-line editing software (I think it was Premiere or Final Cut at the time - maybe AVID?), and framed movie posters ranging from film noir to Pulp Fiction to Trainspotters. I mean, it was really sophisticated for a bunch of 14-year olds.
If I may 'toot my own horn' a bit (I hate that expression because it brings to mind a fart moreso than bashful modesty, but it's late and I'm jetlagged being in LA and can't think of another idiom), I tend to be able to learn and gain comfortable use of different types of software and operating platforms much more quickly than the average person. Maybe part of this came from playing a lot of PC games growing up; I think another contributor was the process of teaching myself how to use video editing software, which can become quite technical when you want to do something more than a home video or vacation movie that you will never watch again.
Anyway, I guess it's kind of cool (to me, at least) that I can use commands to look up a historical bond payment or IPO details on Bloomberg terminal (from working on Wall Street, so needless to say I'm ahem, pretty skilled in the Excel department), seamlessly crossfade between two different-speed tracks in Ableton Live (professional DJ software [i.e. not in the sense of a 'press play on your Spotify playlist' DJ]), draft basic architectural renderings in CAD, set up and format publishing-quality text and graphics in Adobe CS, create technical 2-D animations and complex effects in AfterEffects (consider Apple's original iPod 'dancing silhouette against colored backgrounds' animated commercials: with a green screen and some very expensive software, I could replicate that!), write basic commands to perform repetitive work on my Mac with the underappreciated Automator tool, and most impressive of all, I can (and have) beat Facade on my first try (surprisingly few people, even pro gamers on YouTube [yes, I do believe those guys at the Pewdiepie/Jacksepticeye/Jacksepticeye2 level to be "pro gamers"] can lay claim to this...'accomplishment').
Did you hear me, Trip? I SAID MELON!!!!
I learned how to use FinalCut and AVID fairly quickly (for some reason I was never anywhere that used Premiere), and I fell in love. It took my home creations to another dimension; I could watch movies with renewed appreciation (or not) for technical skill (like Sound FX and Editing, i.e. the Academy Awards categories that serve as a bathroom break) and the often incredible amount of literal behind-the-scenes work totally unknown to the plebes in mainstream audiences. (I'm nervously sensing a pattern here, in taking great pride in underappreciated but necessary work...) Filmmaking (ok, so really film editing on a computer, which sounds much nerdier) was an activity that got me into a Csikszentmihalyian state of 'flow' (as pop psychologists, aka every person who has watched a single documentary these days).
When I recently attended a live concert in New York and discovered the next morning that I had taken some actually decent 'footage' on my iPhone, I wondered if that flow would return after lying dormant for over ten years, and if so, would an editing program as crude and useless as iMovie be able to re-ignite it?
Turns out... yes and no. Creatively, I enjoyed the editing process very much - deciding which strobe light shots to use; at what speed I should set certain scenes to have the greatest intended impact; what (copyrighted) music to use in the background (which Facebook did NOT LIKE, prompting an irate, but probably unnecessary, note to a complaint inbox at Facebook HQ which is probably just a black hole Zuckerberg paid Elon Musk to create for the specific purpose).
Technically, iMovie is the lamest excuse for a film editing program to exist and take up...wait for it...2.66 GB of my hard drive!! That's two and a half gigabytes of totally useless code, which for Apple should be an embarrassment. Apple engineers, I hope you're ashamed of yourselves for putting this trash on everyone's Mac without our permission. I don't know if I would rather have iMovie or a bad U2 album foisted on all of my Apple devices - at least Bono knows what a 'fade to black' is. Seriously - an iPhone is (ostensibly) a Phone (I mean, the calling function works, which is all I'd need to consider it as such). iTunes (ostensibly) offers Tunes (that is, to people who still don't know that Spotify exists). iMovie, well...offers less features and customizable options than PowerPoint. 'Fade to Black' is considered a 'transition' and apparently must only and arbitrarily last two seconds.
The interface is just terrible, period - the frame-by-frame feature basically doesn't exist, and although it does allow you to separate audio (what seems to be its most advanced function), the audio layering is clumsy, and there's no way to adjust the volume at multiple points of a single audio clip (in other words, say that you have one second in your clip during which someone coughs very loudly, but for the sake of smooth continuity, you don't want to delete that second entirely and risk throwing off the audio-video. iMovie thinks that you should either: 1) set your entire clip to the sound level at which the cough isn't an interruption, 2) splice your one clip into three segments [before-cough; cough; after-cough] and delete the 'cough' audio segment, leaving one second of pure silence while the video continues, or 3) do nothing.
Which one is the best option? Well, like the 'choices matter' Resident Evil VII part where you have to choose between Mia and Zoe, IT DOESN'T MATTER AND YOU'RE FUCKED EITHER WAY. Just don't use iMovie unless you want to give yourself a massive headache and spend five times longer than you should on a 40-second clip that eventually Facebook and every social media platform will make you take down anyway for copyright infringement, of all things. Guess I should have just left the terrible sound quality alone, as iMovie was suggesting all along.
Watch my labor of love-hate below:
(Side note: upon trying to upload this video, I discovered that Squarespace doesn't like that either, though apparently not for reasons concerning copyright liability but for load time. Now I have to convert an mp4 to .ovg and inject multiple strings of code into a fucking blog post just to display and play this video. I'm now suspecting that instances like this may be major reasons why I've grown used to learning technical computer skills on the fly.
<video width="320" height="240" controls> <source src="file:///Users/lauray/Desktop/Website_Sub_Blog/pics_n_gifs/facebook/My-Movie.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video>
Just kidding. Here it is, embedded like an amateur because Squarespace lacks the server space to allow users to upload video directly (which I was clearly trying to do with the string of code above). Are they too busy spending that money on creating user-unfriendly, pseudo-hipster generic site templates and 30-second unskippable commercials before streamed videos?
Isn't that awkwardly abrupt cut-to-black ending great? That's what happens when you use iMovie.