You Ruined My Baseball Bat!

I was recently conscripted by a friend of mine to do some editing on a video project. It was after a shoot one night, he bought me dinner and then gave me a quick tour of the TV station that he worked at. During the tour, he informed me of a project the station was working on, a youth camp with kids from around the neighborhood where the station was situated. They were filming a sort of documentary about the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect which is damaging trees all across North America. It's a particularly big deal in Madison's Atwood neighborhood, since they've got a veritable buttload of ash trees.

The program was sure to be a success, given its topical nature. It was also being backed by a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, who had the intention of distributing it to certain educational outlets. Problem was, they didn't have anybody available to edit the piece. Being a recent graduate from a film school who was looking specifically for editing work, i accepted. I came down to the station a couple days later to get the footage and discuss the particulars of the project with the guy in charge.

There was very little in the way of direction on the project. I was given a number of tapes which contained skits performed and filmed by the kids, interviews with actual forestry and agriculture experts, some unscripted outdoor adventures, some other random footage of the kids dressed up as the emerald ash borer (that is, green face paint, Aviators, a fedora and some of those head-boppy ball things), and the disparate elements of a music video. My job was to turn all of this into magic.

I spent couple weeks browsing through the footage, dumbfounded. There seemed to be no logical way to link all of the footage together. No way to arrange it so that it would make any kind of sense or tell a linear story. So, after throwing away a few different rough cuts, i decided to at least try and get something done with it. I just started with the basic improvements on the footage, like overscan correcting, color correction, a feeble attempt to fix the audio, and trying to piece together the music video. While i was doing that, which helped me get a better feel for the footage, i decided to take a non-linear approach to the project. I split the skit into chunks and interspersed the interviews among them. This somehow felt more natural and gave the piece a watchable flow. Otherwise, having the whole story together either preceded or followed by a block of interviews would have had people turning the damn thing off early or else fast forwarding through it. I had a teaser of the music video at the beginning and then put the whole thing at the end, with the credits running over it, which worked out surprisingly well. I thought that this was also the only way to get people to watch the credits.

In the end, i was pretty proud of the final product, given what i had to work with. I felt kind of bad that i took so long to finish it, it is only 12 minutes after all, but they hadn't really given me a deadline, and the contact person i was given for questions about the project, who was not in the employ of the station and was not anyone i had ever met, hadn't been answering my emails during the course of my work. When i received a call from the station manager inquiring about my progress after i'd had the footage for about six weeks, i told her that i had a rough cut done, and she became ecstatic, like Christmas had come early. I took it down to the station a couple days later for a viewing and to get some feedback, and what i got was, "This looks better than i had ever expected it to." Words can't express the great, fuzzy feeling that swelled inside of me; i had been very worried that they wouldn't like what i'd done with it, or that they'd want me to put back in some of the stuff i had left out because it, frankly, sucked. They didn't even really have any suggestions for me; i told them what i needed to do yet, and they asked when i'd have it by. And that was that.

From there, i put together a graphics package for it including lower thirds and logos, and an awesome end animation of the kid who played the main emerald ash borer turning into a cartoon. Feeling industrious, and more than a little embarrassed by the audio which was so bad i couldn't really fix it, i decided to score the entire project. I came up with ten songs, using the loops provided with Garage Band, a music-making program on my pretty new Macintosh. I knew that the main emerald ash borer theme which they'd provided me (the basis for the music video) had been constructed in Garage Band (since they'd told me), so i tried to use as many of the same or similar loops as i could from their project, to give the score a cohesive feeling of belonging.

Even though i'm of the opinion that my score sucks (i only used eight of the songs in the piece, one of them was absolutely terrible and the other is a suite based off the whole of the rest of the soundtrack, in other words just a different arrangement of the other nine songs all together), i kind of like listening to it. So i've decided to release the whole of it to you, and anyone else, over the internet for the low low price of free. Also, i'm releasing this under creative commons, so it's royalty-free if you want to use any part of it for your own video projects or whatever else you might need music for. If you do use it though, please let me know, so i can check out your work. I just like to know what's going on with this stuff.

I've found that i kind of like working in Garage Band, too, as limited as it is. So you can probably expect me to poop out more compilations of my bad loop-based music in the future. Maybe you'll like them. Maybe you won't. But you get what you pay for.

Here's some links!:

The completed emerald ash borer documentary
The complete emerald ash borer score
The score is not hosted in the best possible way, i'm afraid. To download, hover over the icon that says "TrevorTriggs-EABscore" and then move your mouse to the black triangle in the upper right corner of the icon. Then click "download." If it asks you to log in, just click Skip. It'll still let you grab the file. It's a zipped archive with all ten tracks included.

About the Score

1. You Ruined My Baseball Bat
2. Rough Estimate Millions and Millions and Millions
3. I Climb Trees For a Living, If You Can Believe That
4. 100% Fatal
5. Emeraldashborer, All One Word
6. You Ruined My Guitar
7. You're Going to Edit This, Right?
8. I Hear You Like To...Infest...Ash Trees
9. Stop Making Me Self-Conscious
10. Now I'm Playing Crappy Music (EAB Suite)

The titles are all lines of dialog from the documentary, although #7 was edited out and only half of the quote for #3 was left in. I think that #3 is the best song on the score. #7 really, really fucking sucks...i didn't even finish it. I don't know why i even saved the file. But it does kind of flow nicely into #8, which is my second favorite. Anyway. That was a bunch of irrelevant rambling. Judge for yourself.

(#4 is pretty good, too).
Enjoy! Or don't.