Living Lightly

The Living Lightly film is now in the hands of professionals – professional editors that is. By early December we had filmed more than 25 hours of interviews and background footage. I had a list of more than a dozen other subjects ready and willing to be interviewed and filmed. As great as every one of these sounded, we had reached a saturation point. For a film that is likely to be somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes in length, there is no point in going overboard.

So, we stopped filming, and started editing. That’s where the really hard work began. How did I spend my Christmas vacation? Editing film. Despite what the promos from Apple tell you, it’s not as easy as they would have you believe. Getting my computer ready to accept video, and to begin the massive progress of capturing all the tapes onto a hard drive, logging the scenes, and then winnowing down the clips to a manageable amount, proved to be a three-week exercise! And I could not have done it without the help of Emily Wilson (co-producer of “Undermined”, which premiered last week), James Greatrex and “Bear” Thomas).

Now it’s done. I have selected and sent the “best” 8 hours of material to my editing team.

Now that I have passed this hot potato to the editors for a few weeks, with the expectation that they will perform magic, I can put my mind to building up the content in our Ideas Exchange on this website. While I intend to post a series of short clips selected from the large library of material we have now digitized and logged, I want, more than anything, to get others contributing. That means you!

Anouk Hoedeman posted a humorous photo of her emissions-free winter travel solution in the Images section. Blake Poland in Oakville has sent photos and a link to his of 50 Ways to live more lightly and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and he promises us some video footage, as soon as we have made operational our system for sending large video files for posting in the Videos section. We hope to have that to you within the week.

We are greedy. We want more. But we promise to share, if you will.

Live lightly and prosper!

David Chernushenko