Free In the Garden of Rot by Sara Green

1.THE VIDEO CLIP
     
    Not all Internet video is low resolution, blurry or poorly shot. Such is the offending clip that this story centers upon. It was shot with a Canon 7D. That’s 18 megapixels of high definition video, set at 24 frames per second in order to imitate the look of true film stock. Perhaps if it were grainy and out of focus it might be easier to believe. Instead the footage shot on April 9 th 2009 in Richmond, Virginia is as crisp and clear as any prime time television show (so far as you do not blow it up for display on the silver screen). A tripod was responsible for keeping the camera steady and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Photography and Filmmaking composed the shot, giving it that perfect rule of thirds that becomes second nature to anyone taking photographs on a regular basis.
    Cinematic would be an apt description.
    There was intent to set the mood, to make it spooky. The camera was placed low and angled up at about thirty-five degrees, just enough to frame out most of the street light, which gave the shot an ethereal lens flare in the top right-hand corner of the frame. The 12mm lens (a wide angle) stretches what the eye can see. The sidewalk is long, and the rows of buildings converge somewhere far away in the darkness.
    Thirty seconds of the same conditions exists with only the sound of steady traffic and the camera operator speaking to his cohort. His not so deep male voice says,
    “This will look great. I miss doing this. The weather is perfect on a night like this.”
    The cohort laughs, but there’s a cough edging his amusement as if he has a cold or is merely choking on water he had attempted to swallow.
    If you advance the footage frame-by-frame in the high definition quality that once sat on Vimeo, then you could see that shortly after the cohort’s third cough a light actually appears on the hood and windshield of the car.  This is a light that has appeared straight above the car. As it begins to reflect across the entire hood, a burst of light, like a camera flash bleaches out the image. It is pure white. No adjustment of brightness or contrast could develop any shapes in three tenths of a second for which there is pure white. Then the image betrays a frame that when viewed still looks like the Etch-A-Sketch of Zeus.  Click the next frame and the next and it is the same variation. But if you didn’t pause, if you watched the video as it played out then you saw an image that felt burned into your eyes. Much like when you stare at the sun for too long.
    In that burst of light, you are left with the image of distraught faces staring back at you. The cohort lets out a loud hoot, “What the hell was that?”
    And the camera operator’s voice cracks, but he doesn’t say anything that is picked up by the camera’s built-in microphone.
    “Did you see that? Did you just see that?” the cohort says in a strange mix of excitement and possible anger.
    “I…” That’s all the camera operator manages.
    “I don’t know, man, I don’t know. That was too weird.”
    “I just saw my dad,” the camera operator says.
    They both go silent for eight more seconds of footage, the camera does not move. In the distance, you hear another voice react to something. Similar to the cohort, there is a hollering expletive of awe and anger. Just before the sound is made you can see in the distance a bright light in two frames appear like a spear shooting down from the night sky.
    The video clip that was posted online is fifty three seconds long.
    It was originally posted April 29 th 2009 with the title: ‘ What did we see?’
    It was removed sometime in 2010.

2. THE CAMERA OPERATOR
     
    We will call the camera operator, Sam Carpenter, after two of his favorite film directors. He is, at the date of this interview, thirty-one years of age. He was twenty-six when the video was captured. Sam agreed to meet with me after I proposed my intentions of this project as well as when