Today we obtained official permission to use the music from Ken Burn's "The Civil War"!

I'm still trying to get the school project done. I started on another segment last night, and realized that each segment is taking between 6 and 8 hours to edit. The segments run from 3 to 6 minutes in length. The kids did a most excellent job with content, their on camera interviews and a good selection of images to cut to.

However, there's a lot of work that goes into trying to make each one as interesting and as much fun to watch as the next. I'm trying to mix things up so that they're not all following exactly the same format, yet they all need to remain consistent stylistically. So its something of a challenge. Picking the right music has been hard, along with selecting the right images from the ones that I have to chose from without over using them.

The part of the day that was interesting was this...

So I'd always struggled a bit with the music. I wasn't sure at first what I was going to do. There was a classical musician at work that I'd talked to, but unfortunately didn't have the time to commit to it. So I started thinking that I'd be stuck using royalty free stuff or whatever I could construct from loops in Acid - a music/sound editing package that came with my video editing package.

Until I was sure what I'd do, I started using the sound track from Ken Burn's "The Civil War" as placeholder music. It really took the thing to a new level.

I still was struggling with a couple of things. First, it's copyighted material. Second, we've really been harping on the kids to make sure that they tell their story in their own words. There's a big push on plagiarizing material, so using copyrighted material without the proper permission does not set a very good example. Time is really a factor, and trying to get music any other way would have been daunting given the amount of time I'd been spending on editing. Having something already done that was done for something in roughly the same time period would be a huge help.

So today, I put a call into Florentine Films, Ken Burn's production company. I spoke with Brenda Heath, the CFO. I was delighted to hear that she was willing to help with our project. She asked that I email her a list of the songs that we wanted to use and she'd make sure that there were no issues.

Within the hour, I had a response back saying that as long as the music was used for the project and we wouldn't charge admission or distribute it in any other form, we were good!

Wow.. I can't reallyput into words how good that made me feel - what a relief to know that we could use what we needed for the project with their approval. I'm having so much fun and I'm so pleased with the results that it would be really hard if they'd said we couldn't or shouldn't use it. In addition, I keep hearing that the kids, staff and faculty are anxiously awaiting each new segment as I get it ready. The buzz is huge at the school now and I really don't want to let them down.

I sent an email to Ralph so that he could pass along the good news to the class. He was pretty excited to know that we had the blessing from "the master" (or at least from his CFO) that we could use the music for our little project from what is arguably one of the most successful documentary films of all time.