start

BM2K3

2003 Journal

2003 playa death

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

BM2K3

2003 was a very interesting year for us at Burning Man. As you'll read elsewhere, once I recover the pages from a disk crash, we'd just finished a summer travelling around Scotland, Germany, and Manhattan (where we were stranded for a week by a great power outage). Delayed, and thoroughly exhausted, and surprised that Rose had changed her mind and wanted to come up with Lila, I got everything rented, bought, and packed in about 72 hours.

Just as in years past, where I'd taken some portable computer - an Apple Newton or PowerBook - to the Playa, this year it was my Titanium PowerBook G4. Unlike years past, where it was one digital camera or another, 2003 was the year that video was king. I'd never before had both the capability to edit video footage and to burn a DVD, so this was the year to explore another technical boundary.

2003 was also the year in which Isaac and Lila first did the event, and so the two paths crossed, resulting in home movies; shudder :-)

BM2K3 - Burning man 2003 is my first-ever DVD. It's less a documentary about the event and more about the kids' experience and what they saw. Remember that I'm not a videographer, nor was I particularly mindful of what I footage I took. It was intended to be very spur-of-the-moment capture. I think it works.

My tools were Apple iMovie and iDVD (photos from Apple Japan, lovingly used without permission). With iMovie I downloaded about three DV tapes onto my external hard drive and onto the "clip pane".

Then there was the creative agony of cutting footage which didn't help the story along, picking the seconds here and the minutes there, and then generating titles and transitions between the scenes.

Then I exported the movie to iDVD.

I rejected the canned themes in favor of an immersive, full-motion, audio-rich "experience" to give the viewer a bit of the Burning Man ambiance.

To that end I had to go back to iMovie and select full-motion video clips for the main window, each of the scene selection windows, and for each scene button.

(It's amazing how long the editing of the movie and video-clips takes. Everything takes place in real-time, so you wind up watching a scene again and again, judging how it feels time and time again.)

Once done I burned a bunch of DVDs as gifts. I was able to burn in NTSC (US) and PAL (European) formats, so I gifted some DVDs to my European friends who own a DVD player (which is a much smaller percentage than I've come to expect from Americans).

This is the main window of the DVD. The Man crackles and burns in the background, the Play Movie button gyrates through an old-style countdown (which I constructed within iMovie), the Choose Scenes button has Lila running down the Esplanade, etc. I included a bunch of still pictures from the event, but I can't remember if they're from a digital camera of frames of the movie.

This is the first of three scene selection windows. Each of these buttons displays a full-motion video clip, and the entire background does the same. This scene is our drive through Gerlach, NV.

This background was of yoga in Center Camp, with the exuberant sounds of event participants in the background. Music too, I think.

The chapters feature a lot of KidsVille, our home on the Playa, and of the rides and treats which came to us. You see us driving in the village Art Car (thanks again, Gross!), both day and night. There's even some footage from a play in which the children were asked to play bit parts.

This background is the fireworks above the Man, before he's burned.

The footage includes motorized bunny slippers and ponies which arrived one day to give the kids rides, a drive from KidsVille to the Temple of Honor in the Cow Bus, and of course the burning of the Man (through which Isaac slept :-)

Well, there you have it. Someday, when hosting and bandwidth is much, much cheaper, I'll add a small version of the movie to the site. Until then, you'll have to come over and see it sometime. Here it is, enjoy!