Because I am working on the movie-making class, I'm spending at least four hours every Saturday doing that when I could be painting my toenails (not) or doing my laundry. So I have this deal with my boss: every couple of weeks, I'll just take Monday off.

Only it didn't exactly work that way at first. It turns out that it is pretty hard to take a day off during the work week. Even today, when I should have been NOT WORKING, I sat for a couple of hours and went systematically through the files that JF has saved, supposedly backup, of all the students' work in our class.

And was appalled. What the heck have these people been DOING for the past three weeks? Of course, this is not fair. Sara has really finished her movie. Mercy only has subtitles to do and she's halfway through with them.

But Eduardo? He's got four or five live action sequences taken in the club where he DJ's, but there is no story there. I MADE him record a story several weeks ago, but he has no still shots, no real meat that he can hang on the bones of the voiceover that I insisted he do.

Amina has basically stuck all the videos and all the photos one after another into a storyboard and the whole is over ten minutes, with lots and lots of places where she really has to cut and delete. Like when I walk right into the set while her supposed doctor is speaking with her supposed sick Aunt.

When we originally conceived this movie-making class...not this one, but the one we did here in High Point, we thought that we'd basically get everybody through the shooting and the story, and then designate a couple of talented students to do the post-production work. Oh, no, no, said one of the students last winter. We want to learn to edit ourselves! So we taught them.

I am trying to analyze why it is harder for this class to learn this skill. Language, certainly. Some of the students are much more inexperienced on the computer than our other group. The reality of the equipment we have to use has proved an astonishing obstacle. Stuff that we tested before the class started suddenly decides not to work. Stuff that was working last week isn't working this week. Are we just not being fussy and obsessive compulsive enough? Or are we hitting the technical wall that all creative movie-makers come up against--- art and creativity versus The Machine. Windows Movie-Maker is a weak vessel for our creative endeavors, we know that, but it is what most of our students are going to find on the PC they take home. We want to do Grass-Roots Video. Goes to show us all that the tools that the poor have to work with are just plain inferior. They tell me that iMovie is a better product, but how many of my folks are going to go out and buy a Mac?

You don't buy a Mac unless you have already absorbed the snob appeal. Like you don't eat organic until you can afford it. Like you don't stop shopping at Wal-Mart until you have the money not to.

I'm going to talk to JF when he gets home tonight...hmmm...it's 6:30...where IS he, anyway? And we are going to come up with a plan. We may just decide that the post-production work can be done by some of the students that are already finished with their own movies. Or maybe we'll do a kind of group editing thing, where we take each student's raw material and edit it together in class. One idea I had was to meet individually with each student who hasn't finished his/her movie for an hour. We could take three volunteers and spend a little over an hour each on one Saturday.

Actually I started this entry intending to talk about the mystery of laundry. I do love laundry, but it is totally outside my powers of understanding to know why it has taken me all day to get it done. I mean, I have futzed this entire day. Changing the tablecloth. Foiling the ants. Scrubbing the bathroom sink. Folding laundry and folding laundry. Taking the garbage out to the street. Really, how do I manage with just a two-day weekend in Real Life?