Video montage: Celle que les hommes pleurent (Mata Hari)

When our TV instructor Dean Cooper first introduced the video montage assignment and told us we’d spend 20+ hours editing it, I, along with the rest of the class, laughed and thought “Sure, Dean.”

A month later, I was spending my third Friday night in a row holed up for 5 hours straight in the overheated edit suite R, and Dean’s words were starting to sound less like exaggeration and more like reality.

20+ hours later, I considered chalking up my time on the wall, but then remembered I wasn’t a criminal – I was here on my own accord.

You see, I’m one of those people who sometimes makes up music videos in their head when they hear a song. I cut between frames, soft and sharp focus, and imagine well costumed actors moving to the beat. When I got the assignment to produce a 2-4 minute montage set to music, I knew exactly which song I wanted to use and what footage I wanted to shoot.

The only problem was finding a way to translate what had been in my head all this time into something real that I could film. All I can say is thank god for networking.

Luckily, one of my friends from high school is a 3rd year piano performance major in music at the University of Manitoba and one of the people I interviewed for a journalism assignment happened to be part of GaiaPente, a tribal fusion belly dance troupe from Winnipeg.

Using the lyrics and story of the song Celle que les hommes pleurent (Mata Hari) by Caracol, my montage tells la petite histoire de Mata Hari, a Dutch exotic dancer from the early 1900s who was executed by the French on suspicion of espionage during WW1.

Not exactly light subject matter to work with, and it made editing a challenge as I tried to explain the above paragraph visually. Now, looking at the final edit, I’m really happy with how it turned out. But while I enjoyed filming and editing (with the exception of those irritating Final Cut Pro error messages), I’m glad I chose not to major in media production next year.

Too much of this project involved me, in a dimly lit room, fiddling with (and occasionally talking to) electronic equipment. Nope, I’m looking forward to a brand new year of persuasive writing, campaigns, and communicating with humans as a public relations major – maybe with some video doc on the side!



Edit: Yet another social media tool I've become a part of due to CreComm: YouTube. Thanks Blogger and TwitVid for spending hours processing my montage yesterday, only to clunk out in the end.