For the video of Kinthissa's leave-taking ceremony, please see www.lunival.com/farewell/.

In November 2015 William Petter sang Schubert for Mrs Freda Wint, and on that occasion Kinthissa made the sound recording which is included at the beginning and end of this video.

And here is the story behind the video.

Please bear in mind, at the beginning, that there had been an emotional charge about the subject of video. Almost like a feeling of background angst, which was not there, but which could have been there. I took a risk in not asking a single person to record the ceremony.

I decided to rely absolutely on the good judgement of who came to the ceremony. Without mentioning it to anyone, I felt sure, or tried to feel sure, that enough participants would, unprompted, make at least some tiny video recordings of some key moments. Then, afterwards, I would ask everyone if they had any video clips they could contribute, and I'd set about trying to weave something together.

If, as a result of my not appointing a videographer, it turned out that there was no or barely any video, I could quite justifiably have been slaughtered by any number of Kinthissa's formidable friends and relations.

So, would there be enough video, would it be usable? Would it assuage the hearts of people who could not be there, of her sisters in California and Australia?

The day of the event came, it was serenely beautiful, the wind on the chalky hillside behaved. Everything was austere. Some Buddhist chanting, some sacred singing, the dry comforting ringing sound of spade on loose chalk and more chanting...

...as the prayers are recited one imagines light filling your body, from the inside, filling you with love, compassion and wisdom, which then spreads out of your body, and spreads throughout the whole universe, touching all beings and bringing them to a place of liberation.

Signalling to the trees that one of our number would stay, a new guest in their midst, we asked for them to softly send their roots to embrace. As a friend wrote,

"Wordless convergence on the downs and dispersal to the winds, as it were an iron age burial."

Then in the fading December afternoon light we gently took leave, and set out in many directions, leaving the woodland to slowly begin its nightly murmurings.

Another friend wrote,

"Kinthissa’s burial was quite simply the loveliest giving back of a body to the earth that I have ever attended."

The next day, I asked everyone I could reach if, by any remote chance, they had any video of the occasion.

Immediately, there was cause for hope, and for alarm. Hope, because nine people sent in what eventually amounted to 62 video clips, of average length about 30 seconds each. A real abundance! ... one could not, surely, have dared ask for more.

But also alarm, because the clips were so short! In any normal universe, the result of trying to weave something together out of that would almost certainly have been a complete mess.

However, as soon as I started playing the video clips, I began to be overwhelmed by how incredibly atmospheric they were. Alarm began to give way to glimmerings of more hope!

So I told everyone what I would try to do, sent them a six second sample for reassurance, and set to work.

Here is the message which I sent out a couple of weeks later:

'When I said, "I've begun weaving together some recordings and snapshots which people made, they are incredibly atmospheric", I had little idea how true that would turn out to be. Nine people contributed fifty little video clips which like rivers joining the ocean have lost their individuality and merged into something mistily immersive and intimate, beyond what one might have dared to hope for and far beyond what might have been possible if just one person had been asked to record the entire ceremony.'

Intimate moments were caught in a way that seems almost miraculous. Look at this one, for example, where Bob pours a handful of loose chalk into my hands for me to throw. Not only is the angle perfect, but the range of camera positions from which the pouring chalk would have been visible at all is extraordinarily narrow.

Or look at the next pair of frames. In the left-hand frame we see the moment when Christopher gently casts a chunk of chalk. In the right-hand frame it is flying through the air; background focus is lost, while the chalky chunk remains remarkably well in focus. That is testament to the good instinctive reactions of the cameraman, who started changing the angle at just the right moment; most people would have left it too late and lost both background and foreground. It is also testament to the impressive quality of the software running on modern phone/cameras. But that is beside the point. The point is that the cameraman was already there, ready for a shot which turned out to be searingly poignant. The videographer did not have to be fetched.

The next part of the story is rather technical but I'll try to keep it technical lite. This is one of those accounts where the only way for it to make sense is for the story to be told in detail, but I'll leave out as much as possible.

When it comes to weaving together 62 video clips, there is quite a lot of preliminary work which we can skip describing but which basically falls into the category of "evening out irregularities". It is a very Buddhist activity - in Tibetan, the word used for the Sanskrit concept "dharma" actually means "that which makes things straight". I'll just say that the number of unexpected ways in which a clip can be irregular, especially if it comes from a commodity (consumer-grade) camera, is mind-boggling.

Regarding terminology, all you need to know is that what we usually mean by 'video' consists of a sequence of 'frames', shown one after the other at a controlled rate, just like traditional film is a sequence of photographs printed sequentially on a strip of material. With analog video, things can get slightly more complicated, but here we shall stay with digital video which is basically simple. The controlled rate at which the frames are shown can be anything you choose, and a typical choice for purposes like ours is 30 frames per second.

Let's join the flow at the point where two clips which overlap in time are being compared to determine, as exactly as possible, how far one clip is ahead of the other.

These days there is software which can very much help with this. I have to confess that I don't use it, because I've been doing this for 30 years by hand and am probably not going to change now. Moreover, hand inspection of an overlapping video sequence gives one the chance to improve on what would be done automatically, by shifting cutting-points forwards or backwards by a couple of seconds or even by a fraction of a second, to enhance the meaning of the clips.

Finding an alignment point for two video clips means finding a frame in one clip, and a frame in the other clip, which record the same moment in time. Never completely the same moment (unless the two cameras were wired up together in the first place), but as close as possible. 'As close as possible' means at most half a frame-rate of difference, which is a sixtieth of a second if the frame rate is 30 per second; and on average, one can expect the discrepancy to be half of that, i.e. a one-hundred-and-twentieth of a second.

This is way better than what is actually needed, for video smoothness. But if the audio track is important, and especially if it is music, then it is worth aiming for that level of accuracy, given that in practice things are always going to go wrong and one will never actually achieve what one aims for.

To find the alignment point, one can work primarily by trying to match up the audio, or primarily the video, or a combination of both. Audio usually makes more sense if you have software assistance, but is really hard to do accurately by hand. Here I'll only describe video alignment, which tends to be accurate in a wider variety of cases.

The key thing is to look for a short and sharp event which is within view of both cameras. If a person's face is shown while speaking, and you can find a 'p' or 'b' or 'm' sound, then all is roses. The moment when the lips part is, generally, easily sharp enough to identify a particular frame. Or if a person is playing music on a stringed instrument, if the music is fast enough then the moment when a finger of the left hand comes down on or lifts up off the fingerboard can be a good point of alignment. Or if a person is casting a stone through the air (as in a burial ceremony) then if the cameras catch the stone mid-air, that is a very good basis for alignment.

By doing this with multiple pairs of video clips, one can create a timeline containing all the clips continuously arranged as long as there is overlap between enough pairs of clips. Where two clips do not overlap, one can work out the length of the gap between them provided there is a path between the two using overlapping clips as stepping-stones.

One can then start to look at the crucially important question: is enough of the ceremony covered by overlapping video clips to make it worth trying to weave them all together?

It's perhaps like being an archaeologist sitting in front of sixty-two fragments, and not yet knowing whether they can make a vase or whether one will have to settle for a pile of pottery shards.

And the answer that came? Yes! On taking a preliminary look at the timelines, there is enough to make a vase!

As is the way with video, especially unplanned video, the amount of usable material was much less than the amount of material. But it was still a fair whack. Concatenating the usable timelines to give a simple measurement of aggregate duration, we had 11 minutes worth of good quality video coverage.

So I continued work.

Putting the video together was a real pleasure, and feedback about the finished product has been immensely positive and gratifying.

Then, just while I was wrapping things up, I noticed something startling.

I'd known all along, from early in the editing process, that we had a remarkably good amount of continuous coverage. Of the eleven minutes' total video time, it was very pleasing to note that six and a half minutes were the continuous elaboration of a single timeline, covering the whole of the central main parts of the ceremony.

In many respects, relating to the visual quality of video, it is not always important that coverage be continuous. A gap between two timelines ... a gap of several seconds, maybe even half a minute ... can look perfectly OK if the video gently fades out of one timeline, and after half a second fades gently into the second timeline, which shows things from a different angle, and provided the soundtrack is delicately considered. Often it will not be noticeable that the half second gap in the video corresponds to half a minute's gap in reality, provided pretty much the same kind of activity is happening in the two timelines.

But that stops being true as soon as any kind of ceremonial activity comes into play. And all the more, it stops being true once music is involved, especially symbolically important music where notions of meaning and intactness come to the fore. And even at an elementary level of feeling, it is simply much nicer, significantly nicer, if coverage is genuinely continuous where possible. It lends the video a meaningful integrity.

So, the startling thing I discovered, when I was tidying things up, was that our long stretch of continuous coverage was *only just* continuous ... it was continuous *by the skin of its teeth*. Because, in the middle of that stretch of continuous coverage, was a point where one video clip transitioned into the next clip with just moments, milliseconds, to spare.

Actually, when I say "just moments", I mean *just one moment*.

It was not that the length of the overlap of the two clips was just a few seconds, or even just one second. That would already have been close enough to be considered remarkable, though the remarkableness would have been mitigated by the fact that there could easily have been peripheral awareness in one cameraman that another cameraman was just getting ready to record, and so now would be a good time to stop.

No, what I mean is that the length of the overlap of the two clips was exactly *one frame*. That is, the length of overlap was a thirtieth of a second. If you like thinking in milliseconds, that is 33 milliseconds. The first frame of the second clip recorded what was, to within the resolution of the cameras, the very same instant as the last frame of the first clip.

To me, that discovery was an awesome moment when the universe rearranged itself onto another level. However, I do realize that no readers, or very few readers, are likely to share such a feeling based on what I've managed to say so far. I'll try to say a bit more.

One point is that I did not, of course, use this one-frame overlap between the two clips as part of the alignment-determination process which I described earlier ... and that explains why I did not notice the one-frame overlap until later. I did not use this one-frame overlap because *it would have been impossible to do so*. Alignment determination needs at least several frames, and in practice several dozen frames, to overlap.

But then, the reader might ask, how did the one-frame overlap ever get established at all? Why weren't the two clips simply treated as belonging in separate unconnected timelines? The answer is that, to discover this kind of thing, a *third* clip is needed, which must cover both the latter part of the first clip and the beginning part of the second clip.

But then, the reader might ask, why can't this third clip simply be used to provide the continuous coverage ... the net result being that nothing at all remarkable has actually happened? The answer is that the whole magical setup depends on the third clip being *unusable* at the key moment of transition - i.e. the camera is pointing at nothing of interest and thus the clip, or at least that part of the clip, is not used in the final collage. The function of the third clip is simply to provide measurable continuity without any of the content of the clip near to the moment of transition actually being used.

The complexity of the logical structure is rather delicious. If and only if it is already known that there is continuity, then the first two clips make it visible. The third clip makes the continuity knowable, but is no help at all in making it visible.

Well, there it is. An episode in the life of a video editor. The story behind a video, this unplanned, spontaneous, intensely atmospheric video with intact continuous recording of the main timeline, our chalky ceremony in support of Kinthissa's leave taking. I think the one-frame overlap is Kinthissa's thumb-print on the video.

And have you noticed, how everything is somehow bathed in a white light? And how we all got whiter as the grave was filled in?

~Ben