Taking a structural view of ‘A Film Unfinished’

Slant Magazine’s Tom Stempel has a piece on “Understanding Screenwriting” that takes a close look at the structure of Yael Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished.” He sets it up this way:

The problem facing Yael Hersonski was this. She had a rough cut, without a soundtrack, of a Nazi documentary called The Ghetto. It had been filmed in the spring of 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, but not completed, apparently because the Nazis started shipping Jews out of the Ghetto into the camps. For years, various shots from the film had been used as historical clips in other documentaries. Then a reel of outtakes was found, which very clearly showed that many of the shots were staged by the German camera crews. So how do you organize all of that into a film, and what else do you want or need to make it into a complete film?

Hersonski uses archival footage, interviews and other “standard” documentary techniques, but in order to give the film shape, Stempel writes,

…Hersonski introduces the most problematical element in her film. She learned that one of the cameramen on the film, Willy Wist, was interrogated about his experience. She has the transcript, but handles it as a reconstruction, with an actor “playing” Wist. Given the “reality” of the rest of the film, the reconstruction seems artificial, although it is so well done that many people will “believe” it. It is never specifically mentioned in the narration or the titles that it is a reconstruction. On the other hand, that may have been the only way to include the material. And how different is it really from the other actors who read the diaries and reports that make up the rest of the sound track? Still, in a film that is showing us the difference between truth and fiction on film, I find myself a little queasy about it. Only a little queasy, though, since Wist’s statements add a lot to the film. See the moral quandaries dealing with the truth can get you into?

Stempel notes that while it’s not always obvious, all good documentaries have a clearly-thought-out structure. Chronological structure is the easiest, simply plugging in material in the order in which events happens. And what seems a rising trend of “action documentaries” – such as Louis Psihoyos’s “The Cove,” which is a kind of true-life “Ocean’s Eleven” with a wily crew pulling off a big caper as the center – organizing non-chronological work (such as interview-based films on a topic) or less-chronological work (in which events don’t unfold quite so deliberately) can require deeper thinking in the writing and editing. And obviously, a reconstruction or narration can help give shape to what appears on the surface to be an accumulation. How far to take that, or where you cross too far into dramatization, is always a blurry line.

Testing the 5D’s dynamic range, and assessing the 60D

For technical geeks, the debate rages about the video quality of DSLRs. What seemed gained in sharpness and low-light performance seemed lost in such negative effects as shutter Jell-O, moire and aliasing.

But ProVideo Coalition has done a more definitive test on the Canon EOS 5D Mk II’s dynamic range, the ability to find detail over a number of f-stops.

The testing shows the $2,500 EOS 5D to cover 11 stops of dynamic range. In comparison, the $6,000 Sony EX1 has 10 stops, the $30,000 RED One is said to have 11.3 stops, the $150,000 Sony F23 has 13, and the $70,000 Arri Alexa about 13. Kodak claims 15 stops for its color negative film stock.

These studies only further what we know. That these DSLRs, despite their limitations, have been game-changers that have allowed more people to even think about doing film. Ten years ago, video cameras such as the Canon XL1 had only about 7 stops of dynamic range, which meant you had to light carefully and evenly. You would never have put a subject in front of a black background (such as in the clip at the bottom of this post, from Nathaniel Hansen’s “The Elders”) because the camera would have converted those blacks into noisy artifacts and blown out the whites on the other end. But the gap between video and film has grown so much smaller, newer filmmakers don’t even have to worry about such considerations (and may laugh at older films with very flat lighting).

Meanwhile, the EOS 60D has hit the market at $1,100, filling the gap between Canon’s $1,700 EOS 7D and the $900 T2i.

Philip Bloom posts about the 60D, and the Wired’s Gadget Lab calls the 60D “Frankencam,” cobbled together out of lower- and higher-end stuff:

It’s clearly the season for new camera gear, and today it’s Canon’s turn in the spotlight. Along with a few new lenses comes the EOS 60D, a “replacement” for the two-year-old 50D. Those looking to upgrade from their 50D should look elsewhere, though, perhaps to the 7D, as this new camera is more for consumers than enthusiastic amateurs.

The magnesium body of the 50D is now plastic, and the 60D uses SD-cards instead of Compact Flash. It also gets a slew of gimmicky image processing features (Toy Camera, anyone?) and the obligatory video capabilities.

One 60D feature that is getting praise is the articulating screen.

Coach from Nathaniel Hansen on Vimeo.

Just don’t forget that tape doesn’t suck

Amid all the craziness about DSLRs and shallow depth of field, it’s important to remember that the budget-minded documentary filmmaker can pick up some real deals by going against the grain and picking up a Mini-DV-tape-based camcorder. They’re selling on Amazon for $750 new. Five years ago, this technology would have cost you four to five times that.

The HV40, in our opinion, is a gem. Real 24p, great color, and with a Beachtek adapter, able to do a lot. HV40 users who gain “higher powers” by learning the “cell-phone trick” can control gain and depth-of-field.

Here’s a video plucked off Vimeo to make a simple point:

Canon HV40 footage from Orcun Jenan on Vimeo.

‘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.

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.

Will the DIY movement encourage more grants for documentaries?

The New York Women in Film & Television are offering a $7,500 grant for a film by a woman with a disability, or by a woman on the subject of disability. The Loreen Arbus Disability Awareness Grant deadline is September 8.

Grants have never been as numerous for documentary filmmakers, and even more scarce for makers of fiction/feature films. The reasons have always been simple: Even a decade ago, $7,500 was a drop in the bucket given the costs and challenges of making a film that would ever see the light of day.

Grantsmakers always needed to justify their disbursements, and films were always a bad bet. The number of $1 million-budget films (most fictional features) I know that were made in the 1990s that are still sitting on dusty shelves is staggering; the filmmakers (and some of these films are very good) not only had to contend with the costs of film and equipment, of expensive editing facilities, and of pricey delivery formats, but then they hit the bottlenecks of both the traditional forms of getting visibility – film festivals – and of indifferent distributors. Investing in a film was a longshot wager, and grant agencies tend not to be reckless gamblers.

What would the Arbus grant get you ten years ago? Some 35mm film and processing? (Note Albert Maysles comparison of film vs. video here.) Some time at a postproduction facility that bills $300 an hour? The expensive prospect of paying for DVDs to be authored from glass masters at a replication facility?

Now it can fund a good deal of your film. Shooting on a DSLR and editing on a MacBook Pro, you could do something good. And more importantly, with digital platforms for delivery, the film festivals have become more of a vehicle for publicity (and fun) than to ensure your film gets to a larger audience.

That’s especially true for documentaries, which find their audiences in ways that fiction films never will. Your doc may not go to Sundance and be up for an Oscar, but well-chosen topics have audiences, and distributors aren’t really about connecting to them in the way DIY does now, be it Facebook, a website, or getting the right coverage in sometimes not-so-obvious places. (My own current project already has 30 paid theatrical and university screenings set up for 2010 and 2011, largely based on publicity we got on a variety of blogs and from one article on the project in Publisher’s Weekly, all this before we even sent the completed film to a festival. We’ll make all our money back, and a good deal more, before even selling DVDs or determining digital distribution. Being in a festival doesn’t really seem that important at this point, although it would be enjoyable. I’ll post more on that process later this year. And of course, all this will be made known to the granting agency who helped fund the film when we apply for another grant from them).

I suspect that grantmaking agencies that see their funds result in a definable outcome, and who see it done mostly on their money, are going to start feeling good. Whomever gets the Arbus grant has a better chance to complete a film that goes to a meaningful audience than ever before. While it’s my opinion that fictional films remain the longshot bet they always were, documentaries may find more funding with organizations that traditionally avoided funding films.

‘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.

Trailer: ‘Freakonomics’

‘Life in a Day’ gets 80,000 videos submitted

Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald wanted video, and they got video.

The New York Times reports that for their crowdsourcing project that will tell the story of one day, July 24, the filmmakers have received 80,000 video submissions totaling 4,600 hours. If the filmmakers spent 8 hours a day reviewing it, that would take a year and a half to watch (525 days, to be exact).

The Times notes that Scott and Macdonald

have assembled 20 editors and researchers to log and vet the footage. “It’s a mountain, but we’re eager to climb it,” Mr. Macdonald said. The team will winnow the videos, which came from 197 countries, down to 100 hours and begin sharing some results at youtube.com/lifeinaday, in September. The final film will have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and on YouTube in January.

Composer urges system to spur more original scoring in films

Nicholas Chee at Alive Not Dead has an interview with Singapore-born, award-winning film composer Tay Chee Wai.

The composer has done music for shows and documentaries on PBS, Animal Planet, National Geographic and others.

His process:

Most of the time as I’m watching the rough cuts of the film without music, I already hear the finished score playing in my head, and all I have to do is to remember it, and then write it down or record it right away! Now, that sounds really simple, but in reality, it’s seldom that straightforward because the worst thing that can happen at that point (and it usually happens!) is that I get interrupted by a phone call or the door bell… And after that I cannot recall what I ‘heard’ in my mind, and that really drives me up the wall!

For most low-budget films, getting workable music is a dilemma. Chee Wai laments the need for emerging composers to “shoot themselves in the foot” by agreeing to do music at too low a cost, but also that most smaller projects use licensed music from libraries, not giving composers their shot.

Just for the record, I’m not against the use of music libraries. I do feel that they are useful in many ways. But, in order for the music industry to grow at all, a scheme should be initiated to encourage producers to use locally composed music, and of course, local composers should also try not to put too much financial burden on the producers. Perhaps a workable scheme would be to ‘reimburse’ the production company a percentage of the difference between the cost of already licensed music and that of hiring a local composer.

In this way, local musicians can get more involvement within the local film and television industry.

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