<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Drooling on the Pillow

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Getting Gracie 


Last week a co-worker and her husband came over for pizza and beer. They were thinking of going to China to adopt and wanted to meet Grace and talk to us about it. They asked amazingly intelligent questions. I remember the whole two and a half year process as pretty much a well-documented lurch into the future. Our decision was based primarily on personal prejudices. The Goddess thinks Chinese people are good looking and I think they're intelligent. Once we made the decision, the whole thing became a blur.

When I got back I spent another couple of years of trial and error and credit cards getting the equipment, software and some of the expertise to turn all those reels of VHS into a DVD of our trip to China to meet Grace. The raw footage was one of the major problems because with the jet lag and the two years of anticipation and the extreme anxiety of beginning this whole new life as a family, I was in no fit state to think things through, shot-making-wise.

Also, I was pretty new to using the equipment and I forgot that the microphone is about four inches from the mouth of the person holding the camera. Even I got sick of hearing myself talk.

But I got it together and I thought it was pretty cool and I made a bunch of copies and sent them off to family members and friends and people who had helped us.

Mistake Number Two. Everybody loves Gracie and everything, but, after all, it was just a combination vacation movie and baby pictures and the response, when I got one, was a little more tepid than I had anticipated. Live and learn.

So it was a shot in the old auteur arm when my friends asked, no, demanded to have a copy.

Such a thing couldn't be found, however, and I discovered, when I went to burn another copy, that in moving the project from one hard drive to another some things got lost. Like the music, half the transitions and some of the titles.

It only took a few hours to put everything to rights again and it was certainly more fun than than just banging out another copy.

Those hours, days, and months when we two became three, when Gracie effortlessly stepped away from being an orphan and became a daughter and when Lane and I faced a much steeper learning curve in becoming parents kind of got lost in the blur of the events. Putting the movie together forces you to dwell on the moments and you begin to fill in the times between the shots. It may be a crumby movie, but it's a distillation of the best thing I ever did and the movie in my head just keeps getting better and better.
Posted by: Sluggo / 3:03 PM
|
Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com Listed on BlogShares