The SF Postcard Project
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Completed at long last. This endeavor was born out of a one-day camera rig test back in 2005, which turned into an city-wide, multi-day, multi-season shoot throughout the year. It was cut down from nearly 7 hours of raw footage and painstakingly edited over several months, to arrive at its current 3 1/2 minute form.
The reason this project extended beyond a simple camera test has a lot to do with the film's main protagonist Mr. Jonathan S. Fischer. Fischer co-directed, co-edited, and conceptualized the project as a whole, as well as composed the majority of the original music in the film. All in all, this is as close to a 50-50 split creatively as I have ever had on a project, so you will see a definite shift in style and tonality compared to my films where I was the sole creative force.
You might also notice a slight quality shift since this was entirely shot in the DV format (half the resolution of HD) with the Panasonic DVX100- my previous camera which I have since sold to a friend. The DVX100 is now a cult favorite among film students, sketch comedy groups, and documentary filmmakers alike, because of its film-like look and its relatively affordable price (you can get one on ebay fully loaded for around $2k). For standard definition DV, it looks pretty fantastic. Enjoy!
In other filmmaking news, over the last two months I shot footage for three other videos I may or may not cut together. One is a kind of a photographic tour through the amazing new Seattle Public library, that I shot last month, another involving model trains I shot in Pennsylvania around the same time, and finally a studio band practice for The Red Chapel, a NYC-based rock band whose drummer is a friend and cohort within the Symphonic Pictures universe, Mr. David FX Stoller. In addition to being a drummer and elite recording engineer, he is an electronic composer in his own right, and composed the score for Symphony last year.
In writing news, my San Francisco-based feature film script, (nicknamed Golden Gate for the interim) is coming along well. I finished a rough outline of the first and second acts, and am deep into the third. I also continued working on the script for The Dilated Cycle, and outlined several of the remaining 6 short films associated with that project. When I have more to share, you will be the first to know!
Please leave comments! I always appreciate any feedback you might have.
posted by Polymathic Resonance at
11:56 AM
1 Comments:
Nowell,
Postcard is an interesting film. There's no way to put images together without creating a narrative, and thus no matter how objective I am Postcard is always telling me a story, even if it wasn't meant to tell a story. Because of the inevitability of narrative, I felt the piece fell a little flat. It wasn't just prosaic shots of the city out of a tourist industry film, but it wasn't a story in the sense of problem and completion either. The film rides the line between abstraction and narrative in a way that made it difficult for me to really sink into it.
I think what made it hardest for me was the appearance shift in the main character. When the clean faced protagonist becomes hatted and bearded it was a cognitive shift that was hard for me to make, since it seemed like a second character. It might have been interesting to have a cut where all the clean faced footage is story A and all the bearded footage is story B and they're woven together like two people who will eventually meet. Impossible to do now, I know, but that's my thought nonetheless.
I think the production quality and editing were top notch, which is where the whole project began, and ended up as something more. I appreciated all the slow-mo shots and the jaggy in and out shots. I think my favorite was the "crane shot" when the main character is in the park and the shot starts at his face and zooms up into the trees above his head.
All in all a great technical feat with some niggling complaints about the "story".
A.
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