Prop 8 Trial Gets Almost-Too-Accurate YouTube Reenactment

When U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, the most recent legal conflict over California’s 2008 proposition to ban gay marriage, would be broadcast on YouTube, gay rights activists weren’t exactly enthusiastic, as they were hoping that the Prop 8 trial would be available for television broadcast.

What they ended up getting, though, was far worse, as the following week, the attorneys for the defense were able to successfully argue that footage from the trial shouldn’t be broadcast at all, thus limiting the public’s knowledge of what was being said to mainstream news reporting and courtroom Twitter users.

While the trial takes a possibly two month long pause, though, Los Angeles-based filmmakers and opponents of Propsition 8 John Ireland and John Ainsworth are being proactive in spreading awareness of what, exactly, was said on the record. Using transcripts from the trial, they’re attempting to stage reenactments of the entire case, from start to finish, using a cast of over one dozen actors and shot eerily accurately like the original test footage created by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

What’s impressive about the re-enactments is also what makes them somewhat hard to watch — in their quest to accurately represent the proceedings, they’ve created a slow-paced video experience densely packed with legalese. Each part of the experience (so far, they’ve only created two “chapters” of Day 1 of the trial) is over an hour long, with opening statements for the trial only beginning 15 minutes into the first episode. It is not captivating viewing.

However, while a more audience-friendly approach might have been to recreate highlights of the case as opposed to the complete trial, Ireland and Ainsworth are still on the verge of creating an impressive document. Casting actors as key players in the trial serves a double purpose: While the identities of those who testified are able to keep their identities relatively covert (the “cast list” on the site lacks headshots for many of the original players), interested viewers will get a look at the full breadth of the two weeks of testimony. And given the case’s historically unprecedented nature, that is valuable indeed.

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