In this and the next few posts, I will look at how I made
some of my films for the festival. In later posts, I will summarise what I
learnt from those experiences and suggest how you can make a film.
Who
Shot the President started out as an idea for a feature film. The idea
came to me after I had seen one too many documentaries on the Kennedy
assassination. After I played around with the idea for a while, I realized I
wasn’t ready to make a feature.
Rather than abandon the idea though, I asked myself what was
the point I wanted to make. What I wanted to say was that most conspiracy
theories base their argument on a logical fallacy. I reviewed all of the scenes
I’d come up with and picked one that would make that point.
It took me longer than I expected to make this film.
Although I shot it twice before I was happy with it, the hard part came in
developing the idea. I did a fair bit of research to find appropriate images to
use. I used a series of still images for most of the film. I did have one short
“live action” segment in the film. Years later, I learnt that Chris Marker used
a similar approach for La jetée.
I use regular tripod, and put my images on the floor. At first,
this worked well, but as I moved to shorter and shorter clips, I realized that
it required about 2,000 deep knee bends. I wasn’t a fan of deep knee bends to
start with. But, I got it done. Later when I redid the film on 16mm, I used
projected slides to make it easier on my knees.
The sound track was an interesting challenge. I had two
actors to play the parts, but couldn’t arrange them to be in the same place at
the same time. I used an old two track reel to reel tape recorder, which
allowed me to record one track at a time.
First I had Michele L record her lines, with gaps for the
other actor’s lines. Then I had Steve Hanon record his lines while he listened
to Michele L’s recording. We ran into a problem when some of the gaps were not
long enough for Steve’s lines. When we played back the recording, it sounded
like she interrupted him several times. Steve could have talked faster to fix
that, but we decided that the interruptions worked well, so we kept it as it
was.
The final touch was to add an echo. The recorder’s playback
head was after the record head, so I could feed the recorded sound back into
the recording. The sound turned out rather muddy, but years later when I redid
the sound for a 16mm version of the film, the better quality sound equipment
produce a sound that was too clean, so I used some of the original sound.
This was one of the more successful of my films and I got a
lot of good feedback on it. I also got a lot of very negative feedback. I talk
about that in an article I wrote: Why
Do People Hate my Film?
In my next post, I will look at The Fence,
the film I made for the fifth festival in 1996.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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