No, I’m not talking about that time that Ryan had to outrun the cops who spotted him peeing in Quito’s main plaza in broad daylight (although that’s not in the episodes either.  Sorry).  I’m talking about the realities of story and editing which make it so that certain adventures will never make the cut.  Take this episode, for example.  We see the gang’s hike around the lagunas, but what we don’t see is the night that followed, when Freddie and Ryan met up with a bunch of Otavalo locals and hiked through the woods to a solstice celebration at a waterfall.  I know!  It’s even cooler than it sounds.  So why don’t we show it?

Well, a couple reasons.  First, the woods are dark and there’s no room on the rig for a light.  I know you’re like, “DUDE, just get a light!” but it’s not that simple.  In case you didn’t hear, our first camera was stolen in Ecuador, so I wasn’t looking to attract any more attention to our new one than was necessary, and a light isn’t exactly subtle (as anyone who ever played Silent Hill knows).  We also figured that the scene just didn’t serve the story.

I bought her drinks all night and THEN she told me she had a boyfriend.

And life on the road, more than anywhere else, is about storytelling.  This existence lends itself easily to a narrative format by giving our lives those concrete beginnings and endings that our rational mind craves.   The great tragedy of office life is that it makes us slaves to time without providing a narrative that we can comprehend.  When I worked behind a desk, my life lacked any meaningful beginnings or endings, any significant temporal milestones by which I could mark my growth beyond ’15 years with the company!’.  Travel is travel because it has an ending against which we’re able to see the story of our lives unfold.  With an ending in sight, we realize how each moment leads to another, how one expectation shatters the one before, and how seemingly insignificant events have the potential to become the center of our lives.  When we travel, we are all storytellers.

Of course, our lives tell a story no matter what we do.  So while I’m frustrated that I can’t share some of my favorite moments from this adventure with the rest of the world, I know that even the ones that make the cut are no more or less consequential than the moment you’re experiencing right now.  If our measure of an event’s meaning is its inclusion in a documentary series, then most of human history is pointless, but if we believe in the value of a life lived for its own sake then these exploits are worth it whether or not they’re seen by anyone.

So why do we film our lives at all?  Jet Set Zero’s highest aim is to inspire people to take the kind of chances that we’re taking, and it’s easier to do that when we’ve got something to show you.   Hopefully we’ll show you a lot, but if we can’t, then we hope to show you something cool.  And above all else, we hope that you’re making the most of your moments, whether you’re watching or not.

From Thailand,
Evan

P.S. But please watch.

P.P.S. Sure, we could put those scenes up as a stand-alone short, and maybe we will soon…or maybe one day they’ll be extras on a Jet Set Zero DVD…

—

UPDATE (9/23)

Speaking of elements that get left out, here’s something that I completely forgot to mention but is vitally important.  You see the scene in this episode where Ryan is eating pizza and he says it’s “sooo good”?  That’s actually the WORST pizza in the world, bar none, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.  You can practically see it on screen.  If you ever find yourself in the Mariscal district of Quito and spot that pizza place and think, “I’m hungry,” do yourself a favor and go just 15 feet down to the Magic Bean ice cream shop on the corner.  Their ice cream is cheap, delicious, and makes you feel good, whereas that pizza tastes like it’s made out of library books and used waxing strips, and makes you feel glad that mankind will one day die out.  That is all.

A couple weeks ago, a strange opportunity popped up in the classifieds section: an editing job helping rewrite translated text for an MMORPG (like World of Warcraft) being imported to the US from Korea.  Flexing my nerd muscles, I threw together a creative cover letter that landed me an interview.  I got the job on Monday and started Monday evening. 

One of my first tasks was learning the game, so I spent some time playing the Korean version alongside my new boss.  Much less exciting than it sounds – it really just amounted to a lot, “oh what’s this say?” “where should we go now?” “what is that we’re buying?”  But it’s definitely a gaming environment.  On my first day, my officemates challenged me to a Starcraft match over lunch to see who would go buy ice-cream (unfortunately, we had a deadline, so I had to postpone the inevitable ass-kicking that would ensue).  Also, when I left the office on Friday at 7pm, 2 guys were questing together on another MMORPG.  It felt like a caricature of a Korea, in office format.  It should make for an interesting 7 weeks…

Let’s not confuse ourselves.  I would change the soiled underwear of every kindergartner at Brian’s and Rob’s school if it would give me my knee back.  If anything would undo the financial damage, physical pain, and the instability my knee will have for the rest of my life, I would do it.  This job is a small luxury amidst disaster, maybe like winning a poker game during a shipwreck.

And actually, one unacknowledged tragedy of my knee dislocation is that I don’t get to teach alongside Brian and Rob.  I mean, I’m not shedding tears here, given Brian’s horror stories, BUT if there was anyone among us who had a prayer of enjoying that job, it was me.  I LOVE kids, and anyone who has seen me around them would quickly conclude I simply never grew up.  I love to play with them, I love making them laugh, and when they don’t listen, I can just pick 2 or 3 of them up and relocate them, which usually gets all the children’s attention.  Unfortunately, I never even got to try.  So instead of playing roller coaster with kindergarteners, I’m leveling my Korean character…

Note: If you’re in Seoul and have a free bed or couch, let me know.  One of these days, the wrath of Rob or Brian might just spill over…

Poverty seems antithetical to Japanese culture, but after more than two months in country the crew is beginning to find their niche just in time to leave it…

Making this episode sucked.  As you’ll notice, Episode 205 is airing almost a week late.  I think there are 4 separate and almost complete versions of this episode featuring radically different content sitting on my storage array.  The draft I had planned out with the crew a month ago disappeared somewhere around the second revision never to be seen again.  Almost none of the original footage made the episode.

Editing this show alone and on a real-time lag is a very strange experience.   After working on Jet Set Zero for almost 8 months I had thought things would be getting easier instead of harder.  And sometimes they are.  Sometimes.  Part of the trouble is that our bar has simply risen.  Watch the first episode and compare it to the current episodes.  Whether the content appeals to you more or less is up for grabs, but the show has simply changed, in part because I really had no idea what I was doing when we started.

The stress of escalating production values and a fixed number of man-hours to devote to editing is taking its tole on our punctuality.  There are theoretically enough hours in the week to get it all done, but part of the benefit of working in a team is that when things come up for the lead editor — be they personal crises, travel, multitasking lag, binge drinking, inclement weather, or even creative blocks — he or she can at least bounce things off other team members to kick start the engine of production.

I’ve had the flu to varying degrees of severity for the past month, but except for at my worst I’ve been working at about 90% efficiency.  Still, the increasing complexity of our story and the rising expectations of our viewership have pushed us to a gap between air time and real time of almost six weeks.  That gap will close over the coming two episodes, but the content of Episode 205 took place between three and seven weeks ago.  How I keep track of any of this is a mystery to me.

We (I) at the JS0 Production Office use Final Cut Pro to edit our show, and to help me (the sole editor) get some sleep during the week we have Bryan and Kevin diligently log all the footage they record in the field and then email me the log files.  When a batch of tapes arrives I just import those log files to Final Cut Pro, toss a tape into our capture deck and hit “Go!”  FCP reads all the times/lengths of shots from the plain .txt log file and attaches those attributes to clips coming in off the camera for a nice, tidy package that I can work with.  It’s a pretty slick-and-smooth workflow.

Usually.

Fuck you, Steve Jobs.

Windows plain .txt files use a kind of line ending character called a CRLF, or “Carriage Return Line Feed,” which includes more data than the simple LF or “Line Feed” character that Macs use by default when encoding plain text.  The two are incompatible for a number of reasons, and if you’ve ever tried to open a .txt file created in TextEdit on a Mac in NotePad on Windows, you’ll probably have noticed that all the lines are mashed together into one big jumble.

Usually Bryan & Kevin are doing their footage logging on a Windows machine, scribbling down frame numbers and typing them into a pre-formatted text file for me, which saves all the line endings as CRLFs.  But once in a while they happen to do the note taking on a Mac, which saves the batch files with my new enemy in this world, the LF character.

In Apple’s infinite wisdom they have decided that Final Cut Pro (which is available exclusively on the Macintosh) should only recognize CRLFs, and will completely ignore LFs, thus rendering an otherwise identical batch file unreadable.  Naturally this is completely undocumented and cannot even be found in a Google search or forum troll.  I should know: I just spent the last two hours screaming at my laptop and staring at tab characters and word spellings looking for a difference between two text files that, as far as TextEdit is concerned, simply doesn’t exist.

So, in conclusion, to get my Mac only editing software to recognize a .txt file created on a Mac I must convert it to a Windows only text format.

Thanks, Steve Jobs.  Now make me a cheaper iPhone.  And a sandwich.  Dick.