March in Wyoming – Thank You, Ucross!

For the month of March, my home computer monitor will look like this —

— that is, off, because I’ll be at the Ucross Foundation artist residency in Wyoming.

“What Is It with You and Artist Residencies, Licata?”

I’ll be writing, but I’ll also be working on A Life’s Work. It seems I’ve reached a point where I have to start thinking about putting together all these sections (three to six minutes long) I’ve been editing, some of which I’ve revealed on this here little blog.

The film’s narrative structure is straight forward. It begins with a brief Overture where each subject speaks in broad terms about their  subjects. For example, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute says —

Throughout recorded history humans have wondered what their place in the cosmos actually is. Are we alone? Where do we fit in? Is life somewhere else going to be at all like us?  And how much more is there than what we’ve been able to experience on this one planet?

Following the Overture section,  I have the rest of the film organized thematically, so that Tarter, Robert Darden of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, David and Jared Milarch of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, and Paolo Soleri of Arcosanti talk about their Goals, Beginnings, Challenges/Meeting Challenges, Setbacks, Successes, and Other Successes. Organizing the themes to create a narrative structure is pretty straightforward, but organizing the order of the subjects within each theme will be a huge challenge, and that’s where I’m at. You can see the mathematical possibilities are quite numerous.

So I’ll be shuffling all these sections around within each theme. I will be looking for strong transitions, because this film is going to … not live and die by the transitions, but sparkle or not by the transitions. I’m taking a laptop loaded with iMovie and these sections. I’m not looking to do any fine editing. I just want to move stuff around and see what happens.

It should be an exciting month.

And though the posts may slow down a little, you can be sure I’ll be uploading some photos of the Wyoming landscape. Hopefully  the blizzards will wait until I’m back in NYC.