Back in May, the week before Memorial Day to be exact, we got a phone call inquiring about our services and wanting us to video a "ceremony". We thought, wedding ceremony. But no, it was a Catholic Mass to be given by a visiting priest. I was very leery of the job because the call came from Minneapolis (we're south of Houston, TX), the job was to take place that Sunday, they could only pay by a check mailed from out of state the following week, etc.

I agreed to do the shoot but would not edit or release the tapes until payment cleared. It was on such short notice that I halfway thought it was fraudulent, but I wasn't doing anything that Sunday afternoon anyway, so we setup to shoot. (the checks did come in, btw)

Turns out, the officiate was Cardinal Christian Wiyghan Tumi, he was one of the group who elected the new Pope. This was a full authentic African Catholic Mass, complete with ceremonial processions, traditional music, singing, chanting, the whole bit. There was very little notice given to anybody that this going to take place. The group requesting the shoot said the final product was "for broadcast". Having never done anything for broadcast I started asking lots of questions - did they want it in BetaSP, exactly how long should the edit be, etc. They didn't really know. They basically said, "put it on dvd" and "we want all of it", and "don't edit anything, we'll edit".

That last comment made sense; surely they had their own editors for broadcast. The audio was on minidisc from the house mixer, so I did a minimal amount of editing, sync'd audio, incorporated b-camera footage, took out long sections of nothing, minimal titles and credits, etc. The finished product was about 2 hours. I put it on dvd (using 2-pass encoding, which worked superbly) and did a PTT on 2 minidv tapes, and fedexed the whole thing back to them.

The success part? They called last week saying this was the best thing they've ever seen from a remote crew, how did I get such good audio, and could I teach them those techniques, etc. They didn't edit a thing - the dvd is going to be shown on the very small African Broadcasting Network, ABN. Supposedly it was shown this past Sunday (I was out of town and have no way of seeing it anyway). ABN is on DISH Network apparantly; if anyone has this, I'd be interested to know if it made the air. Their online schedule at abnamerica.com hasn't been updated since June.

Anyway, just thought I would share that bit of success - very small in many ways, but also pretty cool for a part-timer.

...back to my regular lurking mode....

David