A journey to Obama's inauguration.

Like I said in the first post, John, Andrew, Alex, and I traveled to Washington to make a documentary about Obama's inauguration. Our goal with the documentary was to show the raw, real human events that happened in conjunction to the swearing in of our president. This documentary isn't about Barack Obama and it isn't about politics. It is about one of the largest gatherings for a common purpose to ever happen in America and the people that made it happen.

If you are interested to know what happened to the four of us and to hear about the people that we talked to, read on!

Day 1:

After an 11 hour drive from Boston, we arrived at 4am to the apartment we rented out. We were renting it from a family that was staying in the area for the inauguration as well. We were extremely lucky and were able to find a place within walking distance of capitol hill at a reasonable price. They had left a key for us in a lock box under the stairs. We still don't really know what happened but for some reason we were not able to get the box open. We stood in the freezing weather at 4am for about 15 minutes convinced that we would be sleeping in the car. (I forgot to mention our apartment was in the hood). The family we were staying with were religious and observed the sabbath so they told us earlier that they would not answer the phone since it was Friday night. I knocked on the door several times but no one came to answer. Finally I tried to call and no one answered. After a few more minutes, Helen came down the stairs and opened the door for us. (Thanks and many apologies Helen!) Disaster 1 solved. I blew up my air mattress, which woke up everyone in the house, and went to bed.

After a few hours of sleep we woke up around 10, headed to Union Station food court (the main train station in DC) for some delicious breakfast and went to the national mall where we planned to shoot interviews and beauty shots of Washington. The four of us split up so I went around with Alex while John and Andrew went out on their own. Not 10 minutes of tape rolled until disaster #2. We were in the middle of interviewing some kind folks from "Rednecks for Obama" (a 2 person organization from Missouri) when, running out of whatever scary government building we were standing in front of, comes a capitol hill police officer who is completely convinced that we will be using our tripod as a lethal weapon. She tells us that it is illegal to have tripods on capitol hill. So much for having the still static shots and time lapses we had planned for. Fine whatever! We call John and meet him with our tripod outside the boundaries of capitol hill to tell him the bad news. Since this incident I have heard conflicting answers as to the existence of that law and I saw two other camera crews with tripods on my walk back. If you happen to know the right answer, let me know. After arguing about whether we should commit a federal offense and use tripods anyway, we decide to send Alex and Andrew back to the apartment to drop off the useless equipment. Disaster 2 solved!

Finally we were able to start shooting. I hung out at the Capitol for about 2 hour long tapes to shoot the setting up of the TV cameras, some nice shots of the building, and interviews. After a large family was done having their pictures taken with the friendly sniper standing on the steps of the capitol, I asked if they would answer a few questions on camera for me. Suddenly out of nowhere 7 of their kids were standing in front of the camera, standing on the steps, and reciting the pledge of allegiance. I didn't even ask them to do it but this was the first moment in my shooting that I realized that maybe we have something here- something worth making a documentary about.

The rest of the day went very similar to this. We got a lot of great interviews and met a lot of very interesting people. When it got dark, the four of us met up and started heading home. When we got back to Union Station there was a huge crowd outside so we went in to try to figure out what was going on. Apparently Barack Obama himself was going to be coming in to DC by train so all these people were there to try to just get a glimpse of him. Whats ironic about this story is out of all those people standing there, Alex and I and a handful of other people were the only ones that actually got to see him. You can see the documentary about what happened in the previous post on this blog so I won't say too much about it, but we followed a guy who took us to a parking garage and we were able to see his train come in to the station. Shortly after, we were asked to leave by a secret service guy.

After that we were all starving because we never ate lunch but we were also very tired so we just chilled in our room for a while. 7:00 came and we decided we should probably get some food. This is disaster #3, where we discovered that its a really bad idea to drive in Washington DC if you plan to actually get where you want to go. After spending about an hour figuring out where we wanted to eat dinner, we decided on a place called Good Stuff Eatery. It's on Pennsylvania Ave. For the book smart folks out there like me, you know that PA ave is also where the White house is. For the street smart folks out there, not like any of us apparently, you know that Washington DC is split up into 4 sections and each street appears twice on the map. If you are trying to find something on one street, it very well may be that the same address exists on the opposite end of the city. STUPID! To make a long miserable story short, we didn't get to Good Stuff Eatery until about 10:00, we almost died in about 5 potential car accidents, we wasted $10 parking for a half hour, we walked for a half hour in the cold looking for a place that didn't exist, I peed on a government building, and I ate the most delicious cheese burger I have ever tasted. Who would have thunk that this random diner we were trying to find was owned by Chef Spike from Top Chef? Disaster #3 Solved!

Ready for Disaster #4? For those of you who don't know things about editing video, you need a special firewire cable to connect your camera to your computer to import the footage. While sitting at dinner, enjoying our burgers, I realized that we forgot this cable in Boston. This was a huge problem because we needed to send back edited packages to The Emerson Channel as we agreed to do but without this cable we could not edit our footage. Which brings us to the 11:00pm quest for a firewire cable. After trying 2 nearby CVS's we decided on the Walmart that was 20 minutes away and was going to close in a half hour. So became the race against the clock that caused another 5 near traffic accidents and 30 seconds after I got in the sliding glass door of wally world, they locked the door and started turning people away. Great success! The incompetent walmart employee told me they didn't have the cable. In disbelief, since they sell camcorders, I searched the electronics dept myself and found them. We went home and went to bed. Disaster #4 solved!

Day 2

This day started out similar to the last one. We got up around 10, went to McDonalds, ate breakfast as the lunch menu scrolled into place. This day was the first major event of the Inauguration. It was a huge concert at the Lincoln Memorial with U2, Beonce, Bruce Springsteen and several others. Until the Inauguration itself I had never seen as many people in one place. Everyone was packed together like sardines all the way to the Washington Monument. Looking for a good story, I followed a family of 4 who were walking to the concert. They gave a great interview as they walked and told me all about what they expected from Obama and why this event was such a big deal in their eyes. Their young kids told me every fact about the government that they learned in school. They reminded me that our government consists of more than just the executive branch. (think about it). I interviewed another lady there who told me exactly what I wanted to know, what would cause so many people to just stand in a crowd when they could watch the same event on TV. She told me that it was all about being together, being with people of a common mindset. "Its all about love". you can expect to see that interview in the final documentary.

The thing that stands out most about this entire trip happened next. Escaping the crowd at the concert, Alex and I stumbled upon a group of protesters who were protesting homosexuality in general, in addition to gay marriage. They had signs that said all kinds of hateful, racist and disgusting things- things that frankly I thought at first did not belong at such a happy event. Since Obama's inauguration was such a liberal event, of course their were many angry people yelling equally hateful things at the protesters, mocking them, even throwing coffee at them. I interviewed a gay couple that was standing in front of them and they were telling me things about how the bible doesn't say anything about gay marriage, and in some cases even promotes it, and how these people who claim to follow the bible literally are sinners themselves because they do things like cut their hair. (I don't remember exactly what they said). I asked them what they would say to the protesters if they could, and what they thought about the protesters' rights to free speech. After that though, I got the idea to interview the protesters themselves to see what they thought of all this. I have always wanted to show something so divisive in an objective way, in which I ask both sides of an argument the same questions, just to find out what makes these people do the things they do. This was the first chance I ever had to do it and it was a truly unforgettable moment. I went past a few cops who were protecting the protesters from getting murdered and tapped one of them on the shoulder. He turned around with a face like I was about to insult his mother and I said "Excuse me, I'm working on a documentary about the inauguration. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions on camera." His face lightened a little bit. The angry mob next to me quieted down a little bit to listen to whatever he was going to say. A guy came up behind me holding a camera and yelled at the protester "Hey Asshole! Let me take your picture!" I put my hand up and told him to wait. I asked the protester, "Why are you here? What message do you have that would justify in your mind having 2 million people spit on you?" Same as I asked the gay couple, I asked him what he would say to one of the people in the mob if he had the chance. Finally I asked him, politics and protests aside, what does it mean to you for 2 million people to come together for one purpose. The protester's eyes lit up like he had never been taken seriously his whole life. It seemed really strange to him that someone actually cared about what he had to say.

I don't agree with anything that the man said. Most of it was deplorable but this is still my favorite memory of the entire trip. I had a real human moment with a complete stranger. I was able to connect with someone as just another human and I think that this is the real reason that so many people showed up for Obamas Inauguration. Obama said it himself that politics and differences should be set aside. We are one people who need to get along and this was the closest I came to understanding what that means. Even if he probably didn't.

Disaster #5: After the concert we were scheduled to meet John and Andrew at 5:30. Alex and I waited until 6:15 and they still had not shown up. The cell phone system was jammed so we couldn't get a hold of them. Finally we decided to just go back to Union Station and get dinner because none of us had eaten since our McTasty's that morning. Finally we get a call from John who tells us an ambiguous message, something along the lines of he found a drunk guy and is following him, and Andrew is by himself in the city with a dead cell phone battery. We managed to tell him that we were going to Union Station when John's cell phone battery died also. (for the record this was an iPhone, which was a Christmas present from his Parents a month earlier.) An hour roles by and then 2 hours role by and Alex and I are still sitting at Union Station waiting to hear from either John or Andrew. We try calling both of them multiple times but the calls go straight to voicemail. We are starting to get worried, mostly about Andrew because he has no idea where any of us are, no idea where he is, has no way of contacting anyone, and does not have the keys to our apartment. Finally after much wondering what we should do, John shows up at our table unable to speak. We get him to calm down and he tells us his story: They found this drunk guy laying on the ground so, being the nice guy that he is, John decided to help him, since no one else was. They called an ambulance and while they were waiting for it, this drunk guy runs away. John follows him. He follows him all the way to the other end of the city while he walks along highways and bolts into intersections. Meanwhile Andrew stayed to wait for the ambulance and has no idea where John went. After following this guy for a long time, trying to get him to stop, he just runs into a random building and John decides to give up. He goes to the Embassy Suites and gets a cab to come to Union Station. It is in this cab that John's brand new iPhone disappears into the abyss. (Disaster #5 still has not been solved. If you are in a DC cab and happen to find an iPhone with a picture of Barack Obama on the home screen, let me know.

So we finally had John back, albeit phoneless and hopeless, but no Andrew. We waited there for another hour and out of some miracle, Alex says "Man we really need to find Andrew" and it is then that the gods decided that they would stop testing us, I look behind Alex and there is Andrew standing there with the saddest face I have ever seen on a human.

Its at this point that we decide that we are being tested by god and if we can get through everything we had been through so far, theres no way we can fail. We walk back to the apartment TOGETHER and call it a night. Disaster #5 1/2 solved.

Day 3

We decided to take it easy this day and edit some short documentaries. They were mainly for a TV show that the Emerson Channel put on at 10:00am on inauguration day. The first one is the "Finding Obama" documentary which is in the previous post on this blog and the other one, which will be up soon is about the Inauguration concert (shot and edited by John and Andrew). The day went swimmingly. We were very happy with what we edited and were excited to go out to the bars that night to shoot interviews with drunk people. We also planned to meet up with some American University girls we interviewed on the first day. But how could we possibly have a day without a disaster?

Disaster #6: In order to get our videos to the Emerson Channel we needed to upload them to the internet. We had so much trouble trying to get our videos uploaded that we were not able to get out of the house until 9:00pm. We expected the day to be easy and fast so we had a small lunch (I only had a bagel with cream cheese). This disaster is kind of boring so I won't explain too much of it, but trust me. It sucked. We were finally able to get the videos to start uploading and we left the house. We went back to Good Stuff Eatery, shot some drunken interviews, one of which was a hilarious Emerson graduate from 1963 and one was a low budget independent film maker who decided to give us a half hour long filmmaking lesson on the street. We got back to the house at around 1am and the uploads had failed on us while we were out. The Emerson Channel needed those videos to air at 10am and they still didn't even have them in their possession. We got it to start uploading again and it said it was going to take 20 hours. This was really bad because the whole reason we went to DC in the first place was to make these videos for the Emerson Channel. We went to bed hoping it would just work for us. We had to wake up at 5:00am the next day for Barack Obama's inauguration.

Day 4

After sleeping about 4 hours, we woke up for the day we had been waiting for. The video uploads were still going slowly. They were only at about 40% so it wasn't looking good, but we had to leave to shoot the main event. We walked outside and the city was already alive. Hundreds of people were streaming past our street and there were street vendors everywhere selling Obama souvenirs. When we got to the Capital hill area the scene was unlike anything I've ever seen before. People were everywhere. The security for the event of course was immense so they had the entire area blocked off and you had to go through special entrances to get into the national mall. Ticketed people had their own gates to get in and the general public was asked to walk around the outside of the entire national mall area to get in. What would have taken 5 minutes to walk ended up taking an hour and a half.

I think that the experience of walking to the mall was more exciting than the inauguration itself though. What looked like a million people were walking down a highway tunnel. It was such a strange sight to see people walking on a highway, but even more strange to see the tunnel completely packed with a slow moving mass of people. Alex had the brilliant idea to stand on a concrete guard rail to shoot all the people in the tunnel. He started yelling "YOU'RE ON TV!!!!" and to both of our surprise, the entire tunnel freaked out. They started yelling at the top of their lungs and waving to the camera and chanting Obama! Obama! It was an amazing thing to see and we got it on video tape! The rest of the walk was pretty similar. A great exodus of very hopeful and inspired people. We got to the mall. We were standing about half way between the capitol and the Washington Monument. We could just make out the dome of the capitol building in the haze, as it was probably a mile away. Lucky for us and the rest of the 2 million people standing in that mall, they had numerous jumbotrons and speaker stacks.

I'm sure if you are reading this, you probably watched the event on TV. you know what happened. What you didn't experience was the feeling you get from standing there with so many people that are feeling the same exact thing you are feeling. When Obama was sworn in, I can't even express the feeling or the mood that people had. It was nothing short of Incredible, an experience unlike any other I've ever had and probably will ever have. During Obama's speech, everyone was just standing there facing the jumbotrons, completely silent. I was turned the other direction. I was shooting extreme close ups of peoples faces behind me and next to me. I could see the tears in their eyes and I could physically see the hopefulness that made this event happen in the first place.

Walking home afterward was the most miserable thing I've ever done. We were all sore, cold and starving, and to top it off we had to stand in a bottleneck with 2 million of our closest friends. It was quite ridiculous. Everyone was so happy about what had just happened though that instead of trampling each other or getting angry when the police tried to split us like the red sea for an ambulance to come through, people were apologizing and saying excuse me.

When we got back, we met up with John and Andrew who had equally incredible experiences and started to pack our things to go back to Boston. We got a call from Jason at the Emerson Channel that by some Obama miracle, both of our videos finished uploading at just the right time and they both made it to air in their TV show. Disaster #6 Solved!!

Since we have gotten back, we have all joked that we should be dead, so many times over. (I didn't even mention the all night car ride back to Boston). But in reality, the difficulties that we went through made the experience so much better. Not only did we go through all the problems and solve them without killing eachother, we succeeded with flying colors. The footage that we have to work with is fantastic and I am so excited to start editing the full documentary. We all grew and learned a lot from our experiences and I'm confident that after this trip to Washington, I will never be the same.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Inauguration Day

Friday, January 23, 2009

Finding Obama

Together

Thursday, January 22, 2009

This is what happened

A journey to Obama's inauguration.

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