The intersection of gender identity and geek culture
While we work on our trailer, we thought we would show a few of our interviews in more depth.
Here we are a few selections from our interviews with Anna Anthropy, Alicia E. Goranson, Mattie Brice, Cheryl Morgan, and Tab Kimpton. The footage is uncorrected, and the edit is rough, but the interviews speak for themselves.
This is the clip reel we showed at GaymerX2.
I‘m getting ready for GaymerX2 and the Kickstarter. That means editing; a lot of editing.
Editing is hard. Yes, the mechanics of editing are hard; but much harder than the technical aspects, are the decisions about what will not make the cut. Reviewing so many interviews for material for the finished film, and more urgently, the trailer; I am struck by how many powerful, eloquent, and important words are not going to get into the final documentary. I have an embarrassment of riches. So many people have been so generous with their time, and thoughts. Every decision I make hurts.
Alicia Goranson quipped at the end of our interview, that she would be happy to see 30 seconds of our one hour interview on screen. I think she will get more screen time than that in the trailer; but her comment does give a sense of the enormity of the task.
My goal is to launch the Kickstarter campaign very close to GaymerX2. The vaugeries of moving halfway across the country, the day job, and Kickstarter’s approval process may have negative influences on those plans; but I want to start sharing some of the awesome footage we have recorded.
See you at GaymerX!
The weekend of March 28th-30th, Sayer and I drove to Chicago to film at Trans*H4CK.
The hackathon, which took place at Dev BootCamp, is: “A hackathon and speaker series that radically shifts the ways trans people live by creating technology that economically empowers, improves access to social services, promotes gender safety and community sustainability, while bringing visibility to trans led startups.” The winning team of developers, RAD, got to present their project at the Trans100 that Sunday night.
I only have a few more interviews to sync. The new render rig running Pluraleyes is a great time saver. This is a screenshot of my Linux box with an RDP session connecting to the Windows box.
Up to this point, all of the post-production of Trans*Geek Movie has taken place on my venerable ThinkPad T61P, running Ubuntu Studio 12.04 LTS. This continues to be my main machine, but I find myself in need of some more horsepower and flexibility, to pick up the pace of production.
There are two issues I keep bumping up against with the laptop machine: First, render time for video is painfully long. Secondly, the few tools that I must run in a Windows environment are not very happy in the VirtualBox installation of Windows 7 that I run.
For this reason I have repurposed a retired 8 core 2.0 GHz Xeon server mainboard as my new post-production box. It takes up residence in a repurposed SparkServer chassis. (I know, this is IT sacrilege.) I have configured it as a dual boot machine; Windows 7 and Studio Ubuntu 13.10. At this point, it has no sound card, and plain vanilla VGA, but the reasonable power of the CPUs means that PluralEyes runs smoothly, and I can offload rendering from Kdenlive while continuing to edit.
I will be adding an HDMI capture board, reasonable GPU, and sound support in future; but this is a good start.
Last year was not the most auspicious year for me. I will not bore you with all the details of my life, this is not the forum for that. Suffice it to say, what was supposed to be a minor, routine surgery, turned into a major health challenge, (thankfully behind me); and a contract for the “day job” ballooned from a three month commitment, to a year-long slog.
Fortunately, the production of TransGeek Movie has not been as neglected as the blog.
I was able to fit a few individual interviews into the family travel schedule, and undertook a major interview trip.
I interviewed Danielle early in 2013. She spoke about how she became interested in electronic engineering, hardware hacking, and the opportunities for building community online. She also spoke compellingly about the challenges of transitioning in the work place.
Update Feb. 13, 2014 @ 10:22
@SailorPlutoid suggests that the title of the post should probably be more like:
On the internet,
nobody knowseveryone assumes you’re cis. Until you use the word “trans”.
Damn! Here I thought I was being so clever. In fact, I was only demonstrating that I don’t even know what I don’t know. Thanks @SailorPlutoid for helping me navigate the minefield of my own prejudices.
Back to our original post…
—
In the interest of full disclosure: I identify as a white, middle aged, heterosexual, cisgender, male. There are two reasons I feel it is important to state this explicitly. The first is a practical concern that affects how I go about making this movie. The second is, perhaps, a more important observation about why I think this project is important.
Over the past month I have had three separate interactions with people on Twitter that made it clear that they assumed, not surprisingly, that I am a transman. Well of course: My Twitter handle is @TransGeekMovie and I tweet a fair amount about LGBTQI and gender issues. Nonetheless, this misunderstanding came as a surprise to me. It’s clear that I needed to make my gender identity explicit.
Continue reading “On the internet, nobody knows you’re cis.”
In a previous post, I have noted that I have a strong prejudice for using Open Source/Free Software tools. However, when a proprietary tool is the only one that does the job, I will use it. I also believe that when I find a great tool, I should call it out.
PluralEyes is one of those great tools.
Anyone who is familiar with motion image post production, knows that one of the most odious task that an editor faces is syncing audio and video. For the purposes of quality, picture, and sound are often recorded on separate devices, necessitating their reintegration during the editing process.
Traditionally, this synchronization is done by identifying a common feature in both the recorded audio and video that can be matched up. Everyone is familiar with the archetypical movie slate.
The idea is very simple. When you slate a scene, you are creating a simultaneous visual and auditory event that you can use later to synchronize sound and picture. There are also other methods based of a shared timecode in the camera and audio recorder, but these tend to be expensive and complicated.
The slate has one major draw back when shooting documentaries, and especially interviews. It is distracting as hell. If an interview spans a camera or audio recorder stop, you really don’t want to get up in the face of your subject with a slate in the middle of a conversation, just to get a good sync mark.
That’s where PluralEyes comes into play. So long as your camera footage has audio, PluralEyes will automagically synchronize your external audio with picture. All you have to do is drop the audio and video clips into the GUI in the correct order.
This is not a perfect fit with my tool chain. First of all, PluralEyes does not come in a native Linux version, so I have to run it in a Windows VM, (I haven’t tried WINE yet). Second, it does not support a edit decision list format that is compatible with the editing software I am using. It does output Final Cut Pro XML Interchange Format, which is well documented, and I should be able write a script to parse it into a form that Kdenlive can use, but in the mean time, I have a “good enough” workaround using PluralEyes’ media export function. What is undeniable is the great gain in productivity compared to manual synchronization.
Finally I am making headway towards putting out some teasers, and a Kickstarter video.
Thanks to Lars Fuchs for turning me on to this tool.
TransGeek Movie is very excited to be going to GaymerX! “The first LGBT gamer convention focused on the queer geek culture”
We are hoping to talk with all sorts of geeks while we are there.
We have questions…
…and we want to hear your answers!
If you are transgender, genderqueer, or cisgender and have something to say about gender identity and geek culture; we want to hear your story. You can find us at GaymerX, wearing the TransGeek Movie t-shirts, or contact us via:
Twitter: @TransGeekMovie
Facebook: fb.com/TransGeekMovie
Email: kevin (at) transgeekmovie (dot) net
txt/voice: 618.210.6080
TransGeek Movie is not associated with or endorsed by GaymerX/GaymerConnect in any way.
Post-production Begins! I am only 1/2 through the interviews I plan to do; but with nearly 20 hours of interviews in the can, the time has come to get serious about post-production.
I have been syncing audio and picture, transcribing interviews, and bookmarking material for the trailer, promos, and Kickstarter video. (There, the cat is out of the bag!)
I have a preliminary tool chain on place:
I am using Akimbo for bookmarking the interview audio. This allows me to listen to MP3s of each interview on an android device, bookmark them, and take brief notes. I can then reconcile this with the footage when I am at my editing station.
I am an open source kinda guy. As far as possible, I am working with free, (as in speech) tools. I am not fanatic about this however. If I need to purchase software to get a job done, I will; but I will always favor an open source solution for my needs.
Right now the suite of tools I am using consists of: Kdenlive for vidoe editing editing; Audacity and Ardour for audio mixing/cleanup; Gimp for image manipulation and color correction; Gimp and Inkscape for graphics; and many many other little utilites for various tasks.
The wonderful thing about working with Linux, is that so much of the work I need to do can be automated with scripts. I have writen scripts to wrap around ffmpeg to do transcoding and resolution shifting of the vidoe; extract MP3s for transcription; and even do background rendering. I use the Ubuntu Studio distrobution. The low-latency kernel makes working with audio and video painless. As I have gotten older, I apriciate the value of stability over having the most bleeding edge releases. As a result, in the last year or so, I stopped chasing the latest release, and settled on Ubuntu’s Long Term Support (LTS) (12.04 Precise Pangolin) as my OS of choice.
I may find in future that I need to accomidate the work flow of others, or that I just must have some feature only available in AfterEffects, of FinalCutPro. But for the time being. This tool chain suits me well.