A few weeks ago, Vimeo emailed me that my “account has been terminated for copyright infringement…after you received a third strike based on a Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” I was confused. And unnerved. Confused because, in my experience watching and playing baseball, the third strike, more often than not, comes after the first and second strikes —which I was still waiting for in the batter’s box, looking over to my third-base coach who sent me the sign to take all the way and work the count. Unnerved because my Vimeo account was home to 47 of the 82 videos I’d made since 2012. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

But what was my “third” strike? They cited ONE example where I’d used a song I didn’t “own” (“All You Need Is Love” for a GoPro video I made at my sister’s wedding). I asked if that was all they were really busting me for. I asked if they were aware of the literal millions of other Vimeo users who use songs they don’t own—who use their website, like I do did, as a not-for-profit, creative PLAYground. I went full snitch and asked if they were aware of—or even seemed to mind— all their users who upload entire TV episodes that they, um, don’t own. Vimeo simply repeated that my account was being terminated. Unnerved became Fuming. I said they were being a bully. They didn’t budge. I slammed the door and went for a long walk —only after sending them this:

Fuming quickly became Sad—not that I’d lost my videos per se but that I’d lost these artifacts of where I was, what I was noticing, who I was with, who I was celebrating. After a few days of moping, I opened up Final Cut Pro. I wasn’t expecting or hoping to re-edit old footage (and then move the re-edited old footage to a new site like YouTube). No, I just wanted to watch the old footage that still lives on my hard drive. Old footage before it was ever spliced together into anything cohesive. Old footage that’s choppy and messy, where the background sound’s often distracting and grating before making any audio adjustments, where the camera’s a smidgen out of focus, where the subjects sometimes don’t enter the frame for 30 seconds while the camera’s running. Old footage that feels like spending time with old pals—regardless of how unpolished the footage is.

I felt a funny shift. I started feeling more grateful for even having those experiences to begin with. I watched for hours. Walking around the Cherry Creek mall, cracking jokes with my 105-year-old walking pal, Mekey. Riding the train from Oakland to Denver. Shooting college dancers in Connecticut, pro basketball players in Colorado, preschool huggers in Massachusetts.

I started appreciating how wonderfully ethereal filmmaking (and all art) is by nature. You observe then react to what’s in front of you and within you. You pay deep attention to things and people—right then and there. It’s nice having the videos online as these finished products to revisit. But what we’re capturing is never not fleeting. (And the experience watching the videos is also fleeting: in April 2014, my big sister’s dance group at Yale projected a video that I’d made a year earlier—of dancers and artists— onto the entire back wall of their live performance and choreographed a dance with/in front of the video. It was incredibly rewarding. And surreal. And there’s no video of that performance, no video of the projected video. I saw the show live. And then it was gone. And still, I weirdly appreciate how impermanent it all was, how it forced me to really be there.)

A few days after Vimeo’s Support team emailed me the bad news (and reminded me of John Mullaney’s bit about the Delta Airlines helpdesk being an oxymoron), I watched Minding The Gap, the heartbreaking and critically-acclaimed 2018 Hulu documentary. It’s a movie about a lot of things. It’s about economic struggles in rustbelt Illinois. It’s about single parents. It’s about the catharsis troubled teenagers feel while skateboarding. It’s about the second-most violent city in the country (Rockford) with <200,000 people. It’s about domestic abuse. It’s about three particular troubled teens who skate, told by one of them over the course of a few years. It’s about adults who’ve failed kids—and how those kids have responded. It’s masterfully arranged, perfectly scored, and deeply non-judgmental—despite all the characters’ flaws and complexity.

There are a few gaps that they’re minding (or not minding): the physical gaps between their skateboards and the ground; the gaps in the quality of footage between the old days and the now days; their gaps in memory—and self-knowledge— between the footage shot of them as teenagers and the interviews conducted years later; their gaps in understanding the people closest to them. (While we’re here, my favorite 10 movies of 2018—maybe my favorite movie year this decade, largely because of its documentaries: 10. Vice (Adam McKay, the dude who directed STEP BROTHERS, has evolved into the Michael Moore of far-left, cheeky non-documentaries, and I’m all for it.) 9. Paddington 2 (SO charming. SO British.) 8. RBG  (a masterclass on tenacity) 7. Springsteen on Broadway (a masterclass on vulnerability) 6. The Old Man & the Gun (a delightfully poetic last hurrah for Redford: robbing banks, mustaches, movie star magnetism as always, 16mm film)  5. A Star is Born  4. Roma  3. Eighth Grade 2. Minding The Gap 1. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?)

 

The other day, Vimeo came knocking again: we are able to provide temporary access to your account so that you can archive your videos. 

That’d be great. Thanks.

You’ve got one week to download the videos, which was, yes, something Vimeo’s Support staff emailed me—not something the bad guys ordered Liam Neesen to do in a straight-to-DVD heist movie.

I re-downloaded some of my old videos. I hopped in the time capsule.

And then, I went back to the original, raw files on my hard drive. And didn’t seem to mind the gap.