Heart health awareness video

I completed a major project at work this week: a dance video to promote Heart Health Awareness Month and the Day of Dance in February.

This literally has a cast of hundreds with people from all over Evergreen Hospital taking part. We even had to put on scrubs to go into an operating room to shoot the nurses dancing there.

I shot and edited this. Three other people (thanks Mara, Mary and Kris!), one of whom was our volunteer choreographer, workd on it with me. We photographed for a week and then I edited for four days.

I've never edited anything like this and it's tricky. You have to cut everything to the beat so that people will all synch up with music. By luck and a little skill, there are several points where the dancers, who were singing with the song ("Say Hey" by Michael Franti and Spearhead) actually synch up with the soundtrack. Amazing!

The video was premiered on Thursday at a Day of Dance launch party at the hospital. Everyone who's seen it has loved it, so I'm greatly relieved and thrilled. If you like it, please pass it along to your friends.

Morning after at the P-I

Went in to work this morning to do my exit interview. The final paper was published last night and the P-I is now a web-only news site.

There were a surprising number of people in the newsroom. Some were working on the web site, others were cleaning out their desks, which is one of the things I did. Computers are being removed from most of the desks.

Before I came in, I e-mailed KPLU and requested a song: Tony Bennett and Bill Evans' haunting version of "Some Other Time." The song is from "On the Town." The lyrics are by the incomparable Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the music is by Leonard Bernstein:

Some Other Time

Where has the time all gone to
Haven’t done half the things we want to
Oh well
We’ll catch up some other time

This day was just a token
Too many words are still unspoken
Oh well
We’ll catch up some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting
But let’s be glad
For what we’ve had
And what’s to come

There’s so much more embracing
Still to be done but time is racing
Oh well
We’ll catch up some other time

P-I Battle of the Bands

Gad! Haven't posted here in over a month. Lame!

The Seattle P-I, where I work, had a Battle of the Bands earlier this week. The groups had to be made up predominately of P-I employees. The bands were great. Who knew there was so much talent at the newspaper?

This last week was supposed to have been the deadline for the arbitrator to rule on the P-I's lawsuit against our JOA partners, The Seattle Times. Thumbs up, we would stay in business. Thumbs down, we would close. The Battle of the Bands was originally intended to be a bright spot in what was expected to be a tense week.

Instead, the suit was settled in the P-I's favor on April 16 (check out the post-settlement party pix here). The P-I lives!!! Whew!

Enjoy the video of the winning band, Force Majeure, doing a simple, sedate version of "Close to You."

Hitchcock's music

There was a terrific piece on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday this morning about Alfred Hitchcock's use of music in his films. American Studies professor Jack Sullivan has a new book out on the subject, "Hitchcock's Music."

Hitchcock believed that music could reveal his characters' motives and souls in a way that words never could. Often, Sullivan points out, the music is telling us things about the characters that the characters haven't even figured out.

Hitchcock worked with some of the greatest film composers of his day, Bernard Hermann and Miklos Rozsa being the two most famous. Hermann's greatest work was done for Hitchcock on films such as "Vertigo," "North By Northwest" and "Psycho" (a rare all-string score).

In "The Birds," the score consists almost entirely of electronic bird noises. The sole exception is a scene where Tippi Hedron waits outside the school as the children sing inside and the birds gather menacingly in the background. Hitchcock loved the contradiction between the innocent singing and the gathering terror. Sullivan notes that it creates an almost unbearable tension. It's one of the most frightening scenes in the film.

In another score for a Hitchcock movie, for "Spellbound," the Theremin, with all its spooky humming and moaning, was first used in a film.

My favorite: Hermann's score for "North By Northwest" (Sullivan praises it also). It's big and dynamic and perfectly sets the mood for one of Hitchcock's best entertainments. Watch the opening to see how the theme perfectly connects with Saul Bass's dramatic credit sequence to set up the whole mood and tone of the film.

You can listen to the NPR interview here as well as selections from several scores for Hitchcock pictures and read a sample chapter from Sullivan's book.