Machinal (Video archive research, Final Cut Pro)

This project was primarily finding and editing period video to project on the walls of the set for the University of Maryland's recent production of Machinal. The set designer, Marie Noel (who was wonderful to work with) and I were the first to finally use projection in a mainstage production. In the program I was listed as a projection specialist, etc, but it was much more involved than that.

The two of us went to the National Archives and spent hours going through possible footage from the CBS reels from the teen's and early 1920's.We made selections, and fed into the camera footage of women at sea-side beauty contests, a couple getting married (inside the mouth of a whale), baby carriage races, steno-pools, phone operators, sky-scrapper construction, street scenes "traffic", police officers, a court scene with a woman or couple, prison, dancing (including footage from Ford's Greenfield Village), and I seem to recall a clock. (Our thanks to Jo Frances, Dr. Fuegi's partner in Flare Films for her video archive recording advice.)

I wish I had stills to share, but the footage was edited in the Cad Lab using Final Cut Pro on Macs. We spent long days/nights in the lab capturing, editing, (timing segments to parts of the play) and re-editing. It took a lot of work to get the segments ready, but the effect of the footage (although warped by the walls) was really interesting.