I've been working for so long on this documentary about Juarez. I have a month left, exactly, till the deadline I set for myself to finish it, but it seems like there's still so much to do. The enormity of the task is just incredible. Working the new interviews that I shot into it is the big problem. There's a lot of excellent material and it's a huge task figuring out how to fit it into what I already have, what old material to chop out to make room for it and that sort of thing.
And the task is made harder by the fact that all the new material is in Spanish. I still have trouble with some people talking. In fact a few of the interviewees, even if I spend an hour playing 30 seconds of an interview over and over I still can just barely make out what the hell they're saying. Others, it's totally easy and clear, like as easy as listening to someone talk in English. Totally amazing how there can be that much variation. And it's not even regional accents. It could be 2 people both from Chihuahua, one talks nice and slow and clear, the other talks like insanely fast and all slurred together.
Luckily I think I might be getting some help. Jacob from San Diego IMC has sent out a great callout to his peeps there. Maybe you'd like to help, even, if you know spanish. I wish there was some sort of global Indymedia mechanism for translating stuff that is audio. The Translation Tool is great for written text. Maybe it could be tweaked by some tech people so you could upload an mp3 clip and people could work from there.
While working on this project I took a short detour last weekend and did a small video for Indymedia Newsreal about deportation, which I've just uploaded to Vimeo. Vimeo is a neat little site, sort of like Flickr for videos. Lots of college kids with camphones just throwing up random silly shit, but whatever. I guess if I wasn't so old and bitter and serious I wouldn't mind that, but para mi, ahora, el toda parece tan .... priveleged. Dude, while you're in Mallorca on spring break taking videos of wet t-shirt contests there are people starving to death right over the next hill... suspira...
Well, back to work...
Posted by steev at Julio 12, 2005 12:22 PM