‘Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking that has no similarity to earlier art forms’

There’s a thoughtful post in Mediajock about “iterations,” in which Daniel McGuire examines that word as used by “Speaking in Tongues” editor Ken Schneider.

Schneider uses the word to describe the process not of “revisions,” but of new versions. McGuire says,

An iterative approach to editing allows one to re-order scenes and experiment with different openings and various endings. Luck comes into play, serendipity, when you try butting two shots together that yields an unexpectedly exciting result. The word also connotes the possibility that sheer chance plays a role. Sometimes whole scenes can be re-ordered easily, more often than not a new order requires multiple small tweaks – like when a variable change in a spreadsheet has an unforeseen cascading effect that completely alters the filmmaker’s perception of the material.

McGuire notes that,

Editing is the only aspect of filmmaking that has no similarity to earlier art forms. Writing a screenplay is similar to writing a play. Directing on a set is comparable to directing for the stage.  Editing a film, and in this case, editing a documentary, isn’t like anything else that ever came before in human history. In a sense you are writing, or creating a narrative, a story, but from images and sounds of real events.  You can cut a scene many different ways, and get a completely different effect. But the individual scenes serve a larger narrative that must have coherence. It needs to be more than the sum of its parts. It is also a temporal experience, like music, but with images, like a mosaic that you view one tile at a time. When it is over, you stand back, and see the entire picture as a thing, in your memory.

The final thought is simple, but true especially of skills such as editing: “Whatever your personality as an editor, success will probably come down to what it has always come down to – what carpenters call ‘time on tools’.”

SPEAKING IN TONGUES TRAILER from PatchWorks Films on Vimeo.

Can you have too many facts?

An article in Miller-McCune magazine about the documentary “Bag It,” which tells us what happens to all those plastic bags we either throw away or recycle, has a curious passage worth considering by documentary filmmakers.

Michael Todd writes of Suzan Beraza’s documentary,

Bag It suffers a malady shared by so many well-meaning documentaries — a mission creep that requires just one more fact on top of the heap already making your brain hurt.

Todd continues by praising the light touch the film takes, and notes its audience-choice awards in several Midwestern film festivals. But he also notes there are some good books on the topic as well.

It strikes us that many people are taking the documentary route instead of doing books these days, and really understanding what each offers in strengths is worthwhile. Fact-laden documentaries can suffocate themselves. Books, conversely, can effectively load in all manner of detail but miss the emotion. A magazine article can effectively detail more facts than Morgan Spurlock was able to list in “Supersize Me,” but print can’t quite capture the surreal moment when Spurlock, loaded up with another McDonald’s lunch, vomits out his car window onto the parking lot.

Todd is right – you can have too many facts. Often that seems a function of documentarians wanting to be seen as experts; sometimes it’s that they become so in love with their topic they’re like a dinner guest going on and on about some arcane interest. Balancing facts with action, emotion and story line is what makes for a good documentary.

Editing Harry Shearer’s Katrina documentary

Harry Shearer is another celebrity making a Katrina documentary, but he’s someone who has done more serious and related work leading up to it, such as a public-radio show in Atlanta. And Shearer, who began as a comedian, took the tack in his film to avoid politicians and interview scientists. Creative Loafing Atlanta has a piece on the man who did the edit on “The Big Uneasy,” Tom Roche.

And it sounds as if Roche was an editor who had nearly complete control of how the film, at 94 minutes, laid out.

As an Atlantan who loves New Orleans I knew a fair amount about the Katrina tragedy, but Harry, he’d been there and knew volumes. So after we shot 25 hours of interviews, it fell to me to do the big cut. I asked Harry what if I sit in the edit suite alone for a few weeks and take this hugely complex story and I simply explain it to me. Then I took that 2.5 hr cut to him and we began trimming and cutting any and all redundancies till we got to 90 mins. Well 94.

Roche has worked on “This is Spinal Tap” and other films, noted that not only is music part of the fabric of New Orleans, but has to be in the fabric of a film.

Music is very important in The Big Uneasy. Note that to tell the story Harry interviewed zero politicians, zero gadflies, just doctors and scientists and engineers. Just the facts ma’am as Sgt. Joe Friday would say. So that can get a little dry unless you get creative, and music helps with both momentum, and applying the brakes too. Now that I have lived there, right in the French Quarter, for 5 months, I really get it. I get the river. Get how the river flows and the music flows and the party flows and the people’s psyche flows. It’s gentle and powerful at the same time and tricky to explain. I had on WWOZ all the time. This New Orleans FM station I came to realize, is one of the most fun and diverse and interesting sources of music in the world. In the world. Then almost every night Harry would have some recommended band and after awhile I had discovered stuff on my own to turn him onto. Then even after the gigs we’d stay up late and edit. A movie doesn’t just happen. It was a ton of work.

Knight News21: journalism students produce short documentaries for multimedia projects

NPR has a blog piece on “News21,” the Knight Foundation initiative that funds eight “incubator” university programs in multimedia journalism.

And if you didn’t think that there’s a bit of a revolution going on, look at the video “Spilling Over,” from students at the University of North Carolina, to see how lower-cost equipment and laptop editing has created the ability to do very good work.

Such effects as shallow depth of field and rich color were, only a few years ago, what separated the pros from the wannabes – not necessarily because the pros had superlative talent, but rather because they had equipment that could do that stuff was prohibitively expensive.

Now, the equipment allows everyone to be in the game, and to be less concerned about technical stuff and more about subject.

According to NPR,

Their documentary takes viewers deep into the heart of a community, showing how the national disaster has deeply affected people on a local level. Kindra Arnesen and her husband, David, are presented grappling with a decision about sending their children away from Venice to escape possible health risks from the spill. The scene is played out on a split screen as they talk on the phone, and the emotional impact of the moment is punctuated when Kindra and the kids leave David behind to work for BP cleaning up the oil.

“The biggest thing I learned was not just how to be a photographer or a videographer on a story, but how to be a reporter,” said producer Lauren Frohne. “We were worried that some people would end up pushing us away. But for the most part, because of the rapport we built with people, a lot of them were OK with it, and that was a new experience for all of us.”

Spilling Over from Powering a Nation on Vimeo.

‘Spilling Over’

Spilling Over from Powering a Nation on Vimeo.

Mixing fiction and fact in ‘quasi-documentaries’

The New York Times has a piece about something that’s worth noting, but not exactly a movement – the number of films that are attempting to merge elements of fiction and documentary, sending actors (sometimes not professional) out into the real world and letting the created story lines work within what might be more or less real.

Dennis Lim writes of “hybrid” films,

Another festival regular, Ulrich Seidl of Austria, makes even more provocative use of hybrid forms. His unflinching documentaries, like “Animal Love,” about obsessive pet owners, incorporate staged scenes; his equally discomfiting fictional films use both nonprofessional actors and pungently real locations, which in his latest film, “Import/Export,” include an Internet-pornography sweatshop and a geriatric ward.

The tendency to mingle fiction and nonfiction can also be seen among emerging filmmakers. Pedro González-Rubio’s “Alamar,” a modest art-house hit this summer, is a sensuous record of an idyllic father-son fishing trip in the Mexican Caribbean: the stars are a real-life father and son, and the trip was conceived for the purpose of the film. Oscar Ruiz Navia’s “Crab Trap” is an atmospheric story of a drifter in a coastal Colombian village, invested less in narrative progression than in exploring a physical and psychological landscape.

The influences may be multiple, everything from being able to shoot with very small cameras that circumvent the traditional need for permits to the undeniable effect of reality shows on the viewing audience members, who are now used to the oxymoronic notion of “scripted reality.” Some is actually tradition borne of low budgets – “Easy Rider” plunged into the Mardi Gras in New Orleans for its penultimate scene when it was shot in 1968. Film experts point out that such work could not be done these days without risk, as most of the people in the Mardi Gras scene had no idea they were being captured in a fictional film. That’s why the same film today would generally use paid extras.

With documentaries using reenactments on one end and fictional films using documentary footage on the other, the middle seems to be something that could be quite interesting. Just make sure you get signed releases!

shinya kimura @ chabott engineering

shinya kimura @ chabott engineering from Henrik Hansen on Vimeo.

‘Last Truck’ mixed footage from 6 cameras

Documentary.org has a post from Steve Bognar, co-maker of “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which was an Academy Award nominee this year for short documentary.

Bognar writes that he and partner Julia Reichert used six cameras to make the film, some rented or borrowed, which included:

A Sony PMW-EX1 (XDCam Ex format)

A Panasonic HVX-200 (P2)

A Sony Z7U (HDV)

A Canon EOS 5D Mk II

A Canon HV30

A Flip Mino

Bognar says they started the project shooting only with the HV30 (he calls it a “3-chip camera,” but it actually has only one CMOS sensor).

What’s interesting is how little difference he felt there was between formats.

Over the last few years, I have read so many negative things about shooting in HDV: the compression is awful…the sound suffers…the images do not compare to those from an HVX-200 or EX 1…

None of this is true. The mini-DV images from our HDV camera, the Sony Z7U, are just as good as the EX1 or HVX200. Strictly speaking, the EX1 is sharper than the Z7U. But the difference is so small that 99 percent of viewers will never notice the difference. If you don’t believe me, watch The Last Truck and tell me which scenes were shot with which camera.

He also said he prefers tape to tapeless, both in the field and in post. He further notes,

Some broadcasters require tape backup anyway. You might shoot on cards, save on hard drives and yet still need to rent a hi-def deck and spend a lot on hi-def tape stock for archival purposes. We rented a DVC-PRO HD deck to backup all our HVX200 and EX1 footage for HBO.

As much as both the manufacturers and the tech-obsessed may be breathing heavily over the impending release of cameras such as the Red Scarlet, Bognar’s experience goes back to the basic notion that story matters, and the technology to get the story just has to be good enough.

Another rating appeal for a documentary, this time ‘Tillman’

Documentary filmmakers don’t always think hard about how their film would be rated, but for the second time in a week, there’s an appeal afoot that objects to an R-rating on a film.

Weinstein Company is appealing with the MPAA the “R” rating on “The Tillman Story,” about football player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan.

Producer John Batsek said,

Of course there is excessive language. This is a film that follows a truly exemplary family torn apart by the death of their loved one and the barrage of government deceit they encountered in their pursuit of the honest truth. We should be looking at this film as a way to show our younger generation the power of true family values and the sometimes unfortunate failings of our government.

Documentary films are such a longshot for any kind of theatrical release that ratings aren’t always a consideration up front. But as the Holocaust documentary  “A Film Unfinished” found of late, the educational market is a channel that can be compromised by an R rating.

At issue in the Tillman film is use of profanity.

“Unfinished” lost its appeal last Thursday; “Tillman’s” appeal goes today.

Physalia’s DIY titling combines elements for arresting effect

The website Forget the Film, Watch The Titles shows the process Physalia Studios went through to create some really interesting titling. Titles are like little films in themselves, and quality titling can set the tone for how the audience views everything after it.

The 3D titling was done with free software:

“Taking advantage of the freedom we were being offered, we tried to take an experimental approach without using a storyboard or animatic, such as we would use for the kind of commercial project we usually work on,” explains Pablo Barquín, one of Physalia’s designers. “Domestika, the event organisers, didn’t even ask to see anything of what we were doing until the actual festival premiere.” Physalia opted to ‘play’ with software developed by Kyle McDonald –a New York-based visual artist who created a simple and fast DIY 3D scanner which he shares for free.

MAD MMX – Opening Title Sequence. Making Of from Physalia Studio on Vimeo.

Next Page »