Andrew Zuckerman:
The Wisdom Project
Moments after each shoot, the cameraman saved the video files from the P2 cards onto LaCie Rugged drives, then backed them up to an Xserve; later they were also copied to DLT tape. Zuckerman brought the footage into Final Cut Studio on a MacBook Pro and converted it into QuickTime dailies, which were saved on a separate LaCie Rugged drive.
Watching these dailies helped Zuckerman create continuity between contributors, he says. “Having Final Cut on my laptop was just invaluable. We’d be in the back seat of a car in some country, doing these quick assemblages of the material, jotting down new questions for the next interview.”
Keeping QuickTime clips of past footage on his Mac also helped Zuckerman build in more continuity between different interview subjects. He was on his way to meet environmentalist Alan Arkin when he remembered that Willie Nelson had spoken about the importance of each person “taking care of their own area.” After refreshing his memory by pulling up the QuickTime clip on his Mac, he mentioned Nelson’s words to Arkin in the interview.
“He picked it right up,” Zuckerman recalls. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s true, but it’s not only about your own area’—and continued the conversation. Having the footage on my laptop, so I could always refer to it, allowed me to create these natural transitions.”
Keeping It Simple
The Wisdom Project isn’t about fancy special effects. On the contrary, Zuckerman’s spare, Zen-like aesthetic forms a clean backdrop against which the thoughts, words, and images of these wise elders are threaded into a powerfully coherent whole. The greatest challenge, Zuckerman says, was managing the enormous amount of material: 51 interviews, each covering four topics at some length. Final Cut Studio provided a near-real-time feedback loop that kept them organized and focused.
“The real value of Final Cut is that you can say, ‘keep this,’ and ‘toss that’ as you go along,” he says. “When you’re working with such a huge amount of content, it’s invaluable—as a time-saver and money-saver—to be able to see exactly what you have at each step, where the holes are, and what you need to do next. It brings everything together, and keeps you moving forward.”
The Mac made it possible for Zuckerman to communicate his vision to those he interviewed. “Famous people are so overscheduled,” he notes. “They’d come to the interview and say, ‘Now, what’s this for again?’ With Final Cut and QuickTime, we were able to instantly show them how their contemporaries had responded to our questions, and that their words had been treated with respect.”
As a result, Zuckerman says, the new subjects felt more comfortable with their own roles in the project. “It made it a safe place for them to open up, and the experiences they shared were honest and real,” he says. “Because of the Mac tools, we got much more than just another canned interview.”
Zuckerman hopes The Wisdom Project appeals to adults of every age and background, and that people will refer to the film and book on many occasions. “One of the greatest things I observed in these wise people was how they could maintain focus and presence of mind in the moment, and be open to the possibilities of the moment,” he says.
He sees some parallels between the wisdom he’s captured and the wisdom he’s gained creating this project. “You could say the lessons of the elders mirrored the best assets of the technology itself,” Zuckerman says. “It’s really the same thing my Mac gives me: the ability to be spontaneous. I came into each interview free to experience these people in the present, because I could see all the pieces of the work in progress and be confident that I was getting the story. The Mac empowered me to be here, now.”
