This past week, I had an editing assignment due for my single camera production course. The assignment required us to take some crappy footage from a bank robbery short film shot back in the 70's and piece it together in a logical and creative way. As I went through the footage, something seemed off to me. All of the clips had black bars on the sides. To remedy this, I expanded the image of each clip so that no black was showing. After putting in a total of eight hours into the project, I felt accomplished. I managed to juxtapose a series of cheesy looking footage into something moderately exciting and fun. This was until my professor told us the next day that those black bars are supposed to be in the clips. After all, the footage was shot with old-fashioned cameras made for standard definition screens in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This was something that didn't click with my 16:9 HD mind.

During our class break, I explained to him what I did and he told me that I would have to go back and resize the clips to how they were originally. Yep, figures. I went into an editing suite on campus the next day to undo my alterations. This turned out to be even more of a painstaking and tedious process than what I had originally anticipated. It also didn't help that my practical mid-term for studio production was less than an hour away.

"It's all going to be okay," I thought. After all, my friend from Studio (I'll call her Carrie) and I were going to see a screening of "Moonlight" on campus after the exam. Soon enough, we would be able to relax and celebrate our accomplishments. She ended up having to finish her own editing project, however, so it looked like I would be going to the screening alone. After feeling defeated by the exam, I decided to watch my "finished" product again. My perfectionist beeper started going off and this one scene looked awkward to me. While I'm sure I was just overthinking it, I decided to reserve an editing suite to fix it. As I went in to edit, I found that Carrie was working in the suite next to mine. When I decided that I've finally done enough on my project without going insane, I went over to hang out with Carrie while she worked on her video. Even though it wasn't necessarily an ideal circumstance, it still ended up being a pretty decent night.

With a 4:3 frame of mind, you could say that everything went wrong. I had to go back and fix a problem that I created for myself, I messed up on my mid-term, and my mission to finally watch "Moonlight" will continue to be prolonged. Looking at the situation from a 16:9 full-picture perspective, however, everything was spliced together in a meaningful sequence. Some crappy footage that was put together in a moderately interesting and worthwhile way.