Horrifying learning experience / by Helen Arase

So I guess my documentary ran on Spectrum this weekend. Stefanie messaged me on Instagram and said people were saying they saw her and Danny D on TV.

22FF86BB-F858-4B7F-A698-24476AE62616.JPG

This is like, one of my biggest accomplishments thus far and I should be happy - which I am - but I’m traumatized by what happened to the documentary right before it aired…

This is the most rookie mistake, and I want to crawl in a hole and die, but I think I should talk about it because it is a horrifying learning experience that I definitely do not want to repeat.

Apparently I had some kind of stroke and didn’t realize I was using copyrighted music for some of the segments. And to add to the already embarrassing blunder, I didn’t even catch it. The Impact editors (the team at USC who’s prepping our docs for TV) realized it was copyrighted and they had to scramble to change out the music. They contacted me to let me know and when I asked if I could help they were basically like, “no thanks, you’ve done enough.”

I was so shocked and embarrassed that I haven’t watched the TV version. I saw it’s on Impact’s Facebook and I’m not sure how to get a copy of Spectrum’s block of programming for last weekend weekend, but man, this was an intense hit and totally my fault.

It looks really bad, and it is really bad. I’m thankful that the editors did their jobs and it didn’t run with copyrighted music, but it sucks to make this kind of mistake.

Let’s move on and up.