I made If I knew . . .
for the fourth festival in 1995. Like My Next Film,
If I Knew . . . was a reaction to my previous film, Who
Shot the President. Who Shot the
President, although in some sense a simple film, had taken me much longer
than I expected. I wanted to do a simpler, easier film for my next project.
The original idea came from a comment a co-worker made. We
worked in the forecasting section of Transportation Planning. One day, while we
discussed the difficulties of forecasting, she said, “If I really knew what was
going to happen, I’d be down at the race track.”
The concept I developed was to have a series of static shots
combined with title cards that had a “If I Knew . . .” comment on them. I came
up with four titles and then looked for images to fit them.
I ran into some technical problems that made the film more
difficult. The most serious was that one of the cameras broke. I lost the shot
I had done with it and had to reshoot. That also messed up another shot. I
wanted to do a dissolve for one of the images, but the only camera I had access
to that could do a dissolve was the one that broke. I used a fade out instead.
When I transferred the film to video years later, I took the opportunity to put
in a dissolve.
I over exposed the titles and didn’t have time to reshoot
them for the festival. Several people asked how I got the “cool” effect on the
titles. I was slow to admit that it was just a mistake.
Several people told me they liked the film, although they
weren’t sure they really understood the film. I’m not sure I really understand
it either.
When I transferred the film to video, I had James
Reckseidler do a music track for it. I feel that really added a lot to the
film.
I planned to talk about my film Contingency
in my next blog, but since I already posted an
article on that film, I decided that I would move on to my summary of how I
would make a Hundred Dollar Film Festival Film.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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