by Flerida Peña (Clutch Participant) Hello all. As you can probably already tell from the byline my name is Flerida Peña and I am in the second iteration of Clutch. As Leah Gold (our encaustic painting teacher) puts it, we "get together to explore [our] identities as young Filipina women living in Toronto in various arty ways".
For the past little while we've been focusing on film and video. We wrote, shot, and edited a short film that was screened for a jury this past Saturday, October 17, 2009.
The following is lifted from our blog (http://clutchwomen.blogspot.com). _____________________________________
I cringed y'all. I cringed harder than an audience member at a Sarah Silverman show. I saw the small camera movements that I thought I had cut out, I heard the choppy background audio that I did not notice during editing, I couldn't figure out why the opening bothered me a heck of a lot, basically a lot of things happened.
Let's start at the beginning:
10 am Flerida is at home. She is attempting to export the film into a Quicktime movie that doesn't stretch the aspect ratio 100x and therefore make the whole thing look terrible.
10:30 am "Holy mother, I'm supposed to meet the Clutch Peeps at 12 before the critique!" Please note, it takes about an hour and a half for Flerida to get to the Kapisanan. She starts another Quicktime export and takes a shower hoping it's done by the time she's out.
10:50 am Shower over.
11:00 am Quicktime export over. It looks better, yay! But there must be an even better version. She decides to just leave and figure out the exporting business at the K.
12:30 pm Another export attempt. It is however thwarted by the lack of memory in her computer. Deletion occurs.
1:30 pm Ahhh deletion still occurring! Must make do with the proper-aspect-ratio version that looks the best. Kevin Centeno sets up the computer-television connection because he's awesome like that.
1:35 pm Watching the film and CRINGING CRINGING CRINGING. Like that picture up there.
1:50 pm Critique begins. Romeo Candido (Senior Producer at Much More Music), Vincent Galvez (Freelance Filmographer), and Michelle Turingan (Freelance Filmographer) sit on one side of the boardroom table and us Clutch Ladies on the other. Many good points and suggestions that we shall indeed follow up on. The main one being that we're doing the voiceover again. Also it will be much slower.
I admit, I was worried about the short film dragging on and that people would be bored while watching, but what they said makes a lot of sense. Since we have a voiceover, we have to allow the words to sink in for the audience and so we can't make it so fast. Otherwise all these words that are integral to the story will get lost in the visuals and then it won't make any sense!
2:15 pm Deletion finally finishes. Sigh.
2:30 pm End of critique. And that's what happened on Saturday with regards to our short film. _____________________________________
I'd also like to mention that I am so happy and grateful that I am a part of this program. I mentioned this in our blog but I'll say it here as well. I came to Canada with my family in 1993 and since then I have let my Filipina identity fade away. So far away that I cannot speak a word of tagalog. Well okay maybe the swear words and slang, but that's it!
Anyway, I hope everyone visits our blog (http://clutchwomen.blogspot.com)! We'd love to have you. :)