A Splice of Life

Samantha Stogel

            Of course, I never wanted to be like my dad, but I scrunch the arms of my sweatshirt up to my elbows anyway and repeatedly click on the mouse. I drag and drop video clips into the timeline and place in and out points on the glowing screen in front of me. My motive is to capture the key moments within a ten day Builders Beyond Borders trip to Brazil, to slowly shrink two hours of footage into a four minute video.

Dragging the cursor to the beginning of the timeline, I curiously press the space bar and lean back in my chair to watch my creation take shape. Pausing on a shot of me, I’m surprised, suddenly, to see this tall, sixteen year old girl, with a shovel in one hand and her hair in a disheveled cement streaked knot, smiling confidently back at the camera. My eyes focus in on the image and I start to wonder if this movie was only about me, how all of its pieces would fit together.

The first series of shots about my childhood would show a montage of images: bike riding thorough Versailles, eating crêpes for breakfast lunch and dinner, and coaxing my parents to take me back to the museum Sciences et de l’Industrie to see if there was anything new. However, the first shot of me in America wouldn’t show me standing confidently, but instead would show the new girl in school, trying to find her place in a world that had become suddenly unfamiliar. I missed the unpredictable variety; the mix of smells and sounds back in Paris.

The next series of shots would show me trying to fit in but failing. Perhaps the next clip is me throwing my gymnastics bag in the back seat as I beg my mother not to make me return to the YMCA. Each time I left practice it got harder and harder to accept that I would never be one of those girls. As the girls bounced into back-flips across the mats I sat there stretching on the side throughout practice, knowing that I—the clumsiest girl in the world—could never accomplish such stunts. 

All I wanted was to come home to an American family dinner, seeing my dad in a suit just off the train from work, just like everyone else. But I knew just what truly awaited me: my dad upstairs soldering his latest invention or on the phone to European clients. I would run upstairs to my dad’s office to tell him to come down to dinner, and this is where my film would introduce my father, the inventor and former recording engineer, in jeans like any other business day, surrounded by the wires of his most recent project. The first words out of his mouth would be “Five more minutes, honey,” but in reality he was working through dinner. The next shot is a pan across my dad’s office and cuts back to me, upset, not seeing his passion for his work and not understanding why he had chosen this path as his future. I don’t recognize that all of his originality is why I am able to live in this unique town, and how lucky I’ve been to have lived everywhere my dad’s business has taken him. I don’t focus on the picture on his desk of him carrying me down the Eiffel Tower stairs in the middle of a blizzard, or his gold record hanging on the wall, or his patents and inventions…. everything that I thought was just another reason that I didn’t have friends. All I wanted was to be everything that he wasn’t.

            My memories of moving to America bring me back to a series of accumulated tears until the eighth grade science fair, when suddenly the girl who couldn’t accomplish a back flip, get straight A’s or hold a conversation with a boy won first place. The only thing I wanted to do was call my dad and have him be proud of me. In the jubilation of his voice on the other end of the receiver I felt something a million times better than getting a smile from the best gymnast on the team. Here, the music changes to an upbeat tempo. The scene becomes brighter. All my attempts to be the opposite of my dad had been the wrong course to take. I began to realize this and this is where my film shifts to a montage of current images, of me working on my dad’s company’s PowerPoints, creating Photoshop designs, and beginning to see the happiness in editing film that I had thought could only be brought to me by being just like everybody else. I found myself in a sweatshirt editing on my computer, happy in my own skin. And as high school progressed, as I learned how to be myself, I found myself skiing, volunteering for Builders Beyond Borders, managing the Lacrosse team, studying twice as hard, and finally, looking up from my book on the beach to find myself surrounded by friends. 

            I snap out of my daydream and realize my imaginative film can end here, because I don’t have to envision my life story anymore. Now, I can actually create the movies of my choice with my own artistic ability. The clips of the movies I’ve created are mostly in folders on Final Cut Pro, but they are also in my head; they are always a part of me. They show heartbreak, confusion, but also love and beauty in the world. They show a music video and a narrative film both completed at New York Film Academy, and they show the mystery of the foreign countries I’ve visited. I press the space bar to continue on with the video. Behind me, I hear a creak in the floor and it’s my dad telling me to come down to dinner. I happily turn around and say, “Five more minutes dad.”