David Licata | May 1, 2012
A couple of years ago I met with an editor about editing the sample for A Life’s Work. The conversation eventually turned to music for the film. One idea I told her I had idea was of staging a choir performance of Is My Living in Vain? Shooting the choir as it rehearsed and eventually [...]
David Licata | February 4, 2012
I thought of this post the other day. It seems as relevant now as it was then, so I thought I’d repost it. I had spent the previous days working on a grant proposal, and now that that was done and out, I was ready to sit down and think about editing A Life’s Work [...]
David Licata | November 16, 2011
In the last post, I offered up a clip featuring Bob Darden speaking about why so much gospel music is missing. The clip I posted runs almost four minutes. I had a longer cut, but I thought it was running too long. I thought I could shorten the Capitalism bit. Here’s his unedited answer. The [...]
David Licata | November 9, 2011
Before I get to the clip, some background. My first meeting with Bob Darden of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project was in Chicago, August 2009. During our sit down interviews it became clear very quickly that I would have to go to Baylor University (Waco, TX) to shoot audio engineer Tony Tadey in action. [...]
David Licata | August 16, 2011
One of the things that gives me fits while editing A Life’s Work is the establishing shot. (And this documentary will require a lot of them.) An establishing shot does what its name suggests: it tells the viewer, “You are here.” Let it be known far and wide: I hate establishing shots in film and [...]
David Licata | June 14, 2011
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Muir was talking about the natural world, but I like to think this applies to many things, including film editing. One of the challenges of A Life’s Work is showing the interconnectedness of these four subjects. [...]
David Licata | June 7, 2011
I had an idea early on that I wanted to include someone trying to decipher an ancient language; code breaking, essentially. I researched and discovered that Etruscan was one of these undeciphered languages. Etruscan. Tuscany. My ancestors. Very exciting stuff. They left behind tombs with spectacular frescos that predate the Roman Empire. A little more [...]
David Licata | June 3, 2011
I came across this excellent blog post, Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno by Scott McDowell. There’s a nice paragraph about a tool Mr. Eno uses: Oblique Strategies cards, a series of prompts modeled after the I Ching to disrupt the process and encourage a new way of encountering a creative problem. On [...]
David Licata | May 31, 2011
I met Josephine Crawford, artist, one time Arcosanti resident, and A Life’s Work supporter, via the wonderful world of Facebook. We’ve had interesting exchanges over the course of our friendship, mostly via the FB comments. She left the first comment in this post in response to my Is Production Really Over? piece, wherein I asked [...]
David Licata | May 27, 2011
Documentary filmmakers frequently encounter a dilemma: how do you know when to say, “production is over.” You can always shoot more, especially now with video. For Grey Gardens, a film I reference frequently, the Maysles shot more than 70 hours of footage over the course of six weeks. That’s film, not video. And film stock [...]
