It’s funny – I find myself doing more and more of my work as a documentary filmmaker in people’s bedrooms and living rooms. I’m talking post-production here.  Maybe this is a new paradigm. For a while now, I’ve been editing a short documentary (a 30-minute film about the Esperanto called The Universal Language) with Shannon Kennedy, a great NYC doc editor. Shannon has a Final Cut Pro setup in her apartment: a table with a computer on it in her living room. It works great. I pay her a weekly rate, and we don’t worry about renting a suite or a system or anything like that. After all, she’s editing on a pretty straightforward system – the kind of setup almost everyone has. I remember many years ago renting an Avid suite by the week to put together my movie The Weather Underground.  That was painful – a lot of money.

I also recently onlined a piece in someone’s bedroom (“onlining,” for all you non-film people out there, is the final step of finishing a film – it’s putting together all the elements of the movie and it’s traditionally been done using a super high-tech and expensive system at a post-production facility). This online that I did recently wasn’t anything fancy, but as a sort of “first-pass online,” it was surprisingly good.

I joked that everyone I work with these days seems to be a skinny guy in his late twenties; they’re all so technical!