It was an acquaintance, the film and stage director Mirra Bank, who turned me on to Vimeo, which I like a lot better than YouTube. You get a nicer profile page, you can make it part or all private if you prefer, and if you have any digital footage (terrible word footage, like saying dialing for phone, what word do people use now?) you can try them out here. Mirra uploaded material on Vimeo to raise interest in one of her documentaries. Me, I’m just seeing how much I can do with my little pink Flip camera, and it’s turning out to be more than expected. My friend, underground comix-maven-turned-“herstorian” Trina Robbins—whose upcoming book,
Forbidden City: The Golden Age of Chinese Nightclubs is excerpted in
Cantaraville—was so happy with the clips I managed to get, impromptu, of the subjects of her new book, she let me know that she wants to show them at her book party at the San Francisco Historical Society, they were that good. Well, we’ll see.
Of course you can’t do much editing with the Flip, you can cut and you can splice, that’s it. And it is only .avi format. But I’m learning how to frame and pan and pace and that’s good. I’m also discovering that Michael knows how to project on screen. (Why does this not surprise me?) Working with him I’m learning how to follow the actor. It’s a very interesting process, which is giving me new admiration for the kind of work
Stephen does.
I have threatened to make
Michael a star of the internet. He says he’d rather be a star of the hairnet.
