What's In and What's Left Out?

The last two days I have been obsessed with editing footage (see previous post) I shot years ago of the Windy City Rollers first event. It was open call for Roller Girls. The event was held at the Cork Lounge in Chicago.

It's funny, I think I am a real good film editor. Mainly because I get totally obsessed, and am not content until I have a complete rough cut. It's like an itch that I have to scratch. And I can't concentrate on anything else until I get it done. It seems sort like a sickness. And that kind of obsessive behavior really comes in handy.

Anyway, I finished the rough cut last night. Really happy with how it came out. I plan on delivering it to one of the founders of the Rollers in the next week or so.

It's funny, it's a document of a wild, free-wheeling event in a bar.  I was reminded how really life is this over-powering river of energy, and we can try to catch the river in a cup, but it's definitely just a paltry approximation of the thing, maybe part of the thing, but not the thing.

You point the camera and capture something, and you miss all the other things not in the frame. And then you have hours of footage and make snap decisions about what's actually gonna be in the film and what's not.

So you have a document, but the document is just a tiny fraction, a fractured, arbitrary, and partial record of what actually happened. You can't capture it all. It washes past you. You snatch a few frames, you put those frames together, and you say, that was what happened... and you know there was so much you didn't see, didn't hear, didn't film, and didn't put in the video.