HOPE
Home – long walks with my mother along the beach, my father’s smoked salmon, springtime in Virginia. After two weeks it was time to tackle the footage. I had gone through the process before – looked through shots, logged stories onto cue cards, written and narrated -but I had never actually edited a piece myself.
I knew I could cobble together an editing system for under eight thousand dollars, if I was careful. I got on the internet, read through dozens of industry magazines, and talked to anyone in the business who would talk back to me. I clawed my way up the learning curve of RAM and ATA cards, firewire drives, and the like. Eventually I bought a system, then sat down with the editing software manual – 7 pounds, 1,434 pages – and read it from cover to cover, twice. Finally, I turned on the computer and started to work.
Over next three weeks I watched all 59 hours of footage. Gradually a feeling started to grow deep inside of me, somewhere inside my ribcage, like a newborn bird just starting to test his wings. The footage was good – it was more than good – it was true to what I had seen and experienced in Japan. The stories were there – the details, the magic moments, and more than anything – the people. I felt again that great upwelling, that overwhelming surge of joy… but this time mixed with terror. I had in my hands a piece of high-quality marble. Did I now have the talent to sculpt it into a truly creative and worthwhile shape?

For two days the terror took over, while I paced around that room and read magazines and tried not to look at the computer screen. Then, loathing myself for the coward I was, I sat down with the manual between my knees and, without further ado, started at tape #1, logging clips.

DISASTER
Somewhere around tape #6 I figured out what made a good shot. At tape #10 I was getting a feel for where the stories might be, and by tape #15 I realized that I was going to run out of space on my four internal hard drives very soon.

Tape #28 put all of that out of my mind. I started to see distortion, first every fifteen seconds, then every ten, and finally in endless driving sheets. It was either my computer or the camera I was using as a playback deck – I knew the footage wasn’t the problem because I had watched it all through once already.

I started switching cables. I rented another deck, and then another camera. Gradually I realized that the footage would only play reliably on the camera that I had shot it on. I stopped capturing footage, hooked up the two cameras and did what I should have done the moment I got home; I started making dubs.

For two frantic days and nights I dubbed and re-dubbed, laboriously backing up and recapturing bad sections and trying to mentally edit around the bad bits. It was a nightmarish, slow-motion race against a gathering electronic snowstorm, and by the time I reached tape #20 I knew I was going to lose. The distortion was everywhere. There was no point in going any further.

DESPAIR
I posted a message in a chat room dedicated to Final Cut Pro – my editing software. A man answered -- his name was Dom – and made some excellent suggestions, none of which worked. Finally he gave me the name and phone number of a man at Canon headquarters and told me to send in the camera and one of the bad tapes. I wrote a letter, hyping every connection I had with National Geographic and PBS, packed up one of my precious tapes and the Canon, then sat on my hands and waited. Four days later I got a phone call.

The good news: They’d put their best technician on the project for two solid days. The bad news – he’d done everything they could, and failed. They tried to convince me that the footage had been recorded on misaligned heads and was therefore unusable. I told them that I had watched the footage from start to finish, that every single frame was crystal clear, and that it absolutely could not be the tapes. Nevertheless, they said, there was nothing further they could do. They had – free of charge -- cleaned the camera, replaced the heads and put in six hundred dollars’ worth of new parts, a generous gesture but one that guaranteed the camera would never play my footage again.

I put down the phone. I stared at the forty damaged tapes – all those images, so much work -- now locked away forever inside those thin black cassettes. I’d shot 104 stories. I took out a felt pen and started crossing them off the list I’d tacked up on the wall. The best ones had come later, after I’d gotten to know people, mastered the camera, spoke the language. 85 stories disappeared under thick black ink. The ones that remained didn’t seem worth the effort.

I could go back. Thanks to Canon I now had a reliable camera. I could reshoot – it probably wouldn’t take more than six months this time, and a million shame-faced apologies. But I just didn’t have the energy. I’d started out with a huge tank of enthusiasm and naïve confidence. Now there was nothing left but fumes. Worst of all, I had seen what was on those tapes. I knew how good it was – and what I could have done with it. It was like catching a world-class fish, fighting it for days, and bringing it right up to the boat before it snapped the line and swam away. I knew what I had. No one else would ever see it – or believe my stories. I didn’t want to fish anymore.

I sat for an hour and stared at the wall. I didn’t even cry. The bird that had been fluttering inside my chest was silent. This had been my one shot – my life savings, my hopes and dreams, even my health on the line. A misaligned camera. Perhaps someone had dropped it on the factory floor, then picked it up and put it back on the conveyor belt. Such a seemingly insignificant gesture had changed my life; snuffed out a dream.

My parents were away for two weeks, and I was taking care of their house. They lived in the most rural part of the Chesapeake, an hour from the nearest movie theatre. There was no one to talk to, nowhere to go. It felt like a morgue.

It felt like death.

DEFIANCE
Sometime after dark, I picked up my old Sony video camera and started idly fiddling with it. The Canon guy had told me the playheads had to be lined up to within a tenth of a human hair. I could imagine what their tech center looked like – full of oscilloscopes and voltmeters and everyone working with masks and surgical gloves. But then, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I stuck in a tape, opened the camera up, and hit play. I used one of those travel toothpicks – the metal ones, with a hook on the end, to put pressure on different camera innards… up, down, side to side. I watched the screen. Nothing happened. I snagged the cassette holder and pulled on it. The distortion decreased noticeably. I put more pressure on. It got even better, and by the time I’d slid a pencil under the pick for leverage, the picture on the screen was absolutely pristine. In an agony of hope and disbelieve, I reached over with my other hand, grabbed a second deck, stuffed in a tape, and started to dub.

Thirty minutes later I knew I couldn’t sit there for forty hours and hold the pick.I flew through the house, grabbing whatever I could find. Dental floss, a piece of my mother’s pottery, a curved suture needle, every battery in every drawer, from triple A’s to D’s. I carefully hung the Sony camera upside-down from the ceiling with dental floss, and stabilized it with a spider’s web of lines to a door handle, the corner of my desk, and a computer monitor. I used the suture needle to thread the dental floss through the cassette holder and hung the piece of pottery from it, hoping that gravity would mimic the pressure of my toothpick. I hit play, watched the screen, and started dropping batteries into the bowl. First triple A’s then, B’s and C’s and D’s. Eventually I got it just right, and the screen cleared. Then I started to dub.
For the next three days I dubbed tapes non-stop. Each one was different – the Canon’s misalignment had increased over time, so it needed more weight with the later tapes. In the end I had a list of 59 tapes, and beside each one a unique designation: (2)C, 3(AA), 1(AAA). I wondered briefly if some unsuspecting editor would one day inherit my box of tapes and the list, and if he would crack the code.

When I tumbled into bed 76 hours later I had a working set of dubs. And, under the fog of elation and the fragile beginnings of hope, there was another feeling. Defiance. I was going to make this film in spite of everything. I was going to do it, no matter what the odds.