Seattle documentary filmmaker Nassim Assefi brought over a Netflix dvd of The War Tapes a couple nights ago. Watching this film so quickly after watching Iraq in Fragments was an interesting juxtaposition. This is a very different take on the Iraq war: the world as seen through cameras given to National Guard soldiers deployed to Iraq by filmmaker Deborah Scranton and her team, which included Hoop Dreams director Steve James, who was producer/editor on this film.

I’m guessing the editor had the toughest job on this film, as the bulk of the film was cobbled together from footage that was sent home to the filmmakers by the soliders. I guess that’s what some people would call innovative filmmaking. This film certainly tells a fully developed story that probably couldn’t have been told any other way. But compared with the work that James Longly produced at the same time in the same place, I’m tempted to call it inferior filmmaking. The difference, of course, is that James was there, actually making the film himself, while the War Tapes filmmakers were at home, reviewing footage produced by soldiers. It’s a very different approach, with very different results.

The filmmakers do actually make a bit of film themselves, though, beginning with the soldiers themselves before they are deployed to Iraq, and also following them after their return long enough to find out that they have (surprise surprise) been changed by their experiences.

The point of view of this film seems to be “soldiers are people, too.” Or maybe, “soldiers are victims of this war as much as anyone else.” But I found the soldiers to be pretty unsavory characters who made bizarre choices in life. After the inevitable horrors they encounter (seeing an Iraqi girl run over by a convoy they were protecting, killing iraqis and generally being afraid for their lives the whole time they were there) they come home and half of them end up quickly diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. But my feeling after watching this film is that these guys were not victims of Bush’s war machine as much as they were willing accomplices.

From a filmmaking perspective, this film proves that it’s absolutely possible to make a compelling, highly engaging film using the work of amateurs, provided you’ve got a dedicated team of talented filmmakers managing the process from beginning to end. This film is sort of a natural extension of the basic idea behind Born Into Brothels – giving cameras to kids. No doubt we’ll see more of this kind of filmmaking as good quality, inexpensive video cameras become as ubiquitous as cellphones.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about art after 7 years of going to Burning Man, it’s that the process of creating art is far more interesting than the product that gets created. To say this another way: going to a museum to look at art is a little like going to a zoo to look at animals.

In Rivers and Tides, Thomas Riedelsheimer shows us art in the wild. Literally. Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy creates sculptures from objects he finds in their natural environment – everything from chunks of ice to stones to tree branches. And the results are absolutely striking to look at – for a little while. Until the tide covers it. Until it melts. Or until it collapses from the weight of one too many stones.

The cinematography in this film is as beautiful as the art itself. It’s like Reidelsheimer is undressing the art with his camera. He makes frequent use of a crane to glide into, over and around the art. Much of the film was made in rugged outdoor conditions – for example, the middle of frosty fields and muddy rivers. So packing a crane around can’t have been easy.

I’ve never seen a crane in action, but watching the slow, fluid movements a crane makes possible makes we want to try it. I did some Googling and found that you can buy a decent camera crane for around $1,500. But then you should probably add a field monitor, and a way to control the focus and on and on. Plus you’d have to assemble the thing, take it down after after every shoot, etc. It’s a commitment.

Filmmaker takeaway: You can bring a subject to life by approaching it with your camera like a patient lover.

What’s incredible about this Oscar-nominated film is that it appears to have been made almost singlehandedly by a lone white guy, James Longly. He was born in Eugene, Oregon, but apparently hasn’t spent much time there over the past several years. Instead, he’s been living in places like Iraq (where he spent 2 years making this film); Iran (where he was arrested during the election last year), and he’s currently doing more of the same in Pakistan.

The first thing that struck me, as a filmmaker, about this extraordinary film is the way the opening sequence was shot – in fragments – by simply pointing the camera out of a vehicle traveling down the street with a fast shutter speed of maybe 250/second, which gives you a stuttering sequence of still frames strung together. It’s a technique popularized by Hollywood films like Saving Private Ryan and Traffic, and it works extremely well here to show that we’re entering a chaotic world.

There’s a shot early on in the film that I won’t forget for a long time: a sketchy street seen through a fish tank in which a pair of breathtakingly orange goldfish are floating. The contrast is unbelievable. It’s just an incredible shot that, if you got it, it has to go in the film. Reminded me that no matter where you are, keep your eyes open for things that don’t to fit within the paradigm of  everything else you’re keying on.

The most significant filmmaker take-away from this film is that it’s possible to include interviews in your film without including interviews. I’ll explain. In the first two-thirds of the film, at no point does the voice of the person being interviewed match with an interview happening on screen. Yet, we’re often seeing the person who is talking – only in different (but frequently related) situations. For example, the first person we get to know in the film is a young boy, who works for an abusive boss at a small car and motorbike repair shop. We hear the boy’s voice for a long time before we actually meet the boy, and when we meet him, it’s not in an interview context. He’s essentially giving us a voice-driven commentary about how awful his boss is, while at the same time we’re actually seeing how awful his boss is.

This is an extremely effective way to include interviews without forcing the audience to sit through predictable visuals. They are actually seeing what happens next at the same time as hearing what they need to hear to flesh out the story details. It’s brilliant. It’s a seamless combination of cinema verite with traditional documentary storytelling, and in this film at least, it’s effect is spellbinding. It doesn’t hurt that the kid is mostly silent through these ordeals, so there’s room for us to hear him explaining things. But the technique also works pretty well in part 2 of the film, when Longly manages to get himself embedded with Muqtada al Sadr’s militia during a tense period when most US journalists were getting embedded with US troops.

Random filmmaker observations:

I really liked the time-speeded sequence of the train leaving southern Iraq and then we lurch into fast motion, the perspective switches from looking backward to looking forward, and we zip across the country in a few seconds into northern Iraq, where Longly hooks up with a Kurdish family. I just found a speed manipulation tutorial on Ken Stone’s Final Cut site that explains in detail, complete with project files, how to do this effect in Final Cut Pro 7.

Longly used a Panasonic DVX 100 while making this film, the standard-definition precursor to the Panasonic HVX 200 (which we used to shoot virtually all of Shine). The highlights are frequently blown out, and it lacks HD clarity, and there’s a lot of mic handling noise during some of the militia scenes. But none of that matters a bit, because the story is so damn compelling. The film is a solid reminder that the story and the person behind the camera is always more important than the equipment.

I found myself wondering if Longly used a Glidecam or something like a Steadicam Merlin for some of his traveling shots. They weren’t rock steady, but they were smoother than I could have hand held.

There are a lot of very briefly held, beautiful, almost still shots edited in liberally throughout the film. It reminded me that you don’t have to always be thinking in terms of sequence – just shoot something pretty even if it’s a couple seconds – you can find a place for it in editing. Also, he uses whip pans really effectively  as a transition at once point, panning quickly away from a child’s face and holding the blurry transition until dropping in the next clip. Whip-panning off someone’s face is a dramatic and powerful way to initiate a transition, and you don’t have to come to a sudden and precise stop on something else within the camera for it to be extremely useable in editing.

I really liked the brief time-disolve of the school teacher herding students down the hall. It’s a great way to convey time passing slowly for the child throughout the school day. And you don’t have to do a lot of these to call attention to them – I thought this was truly judicious use of these techniques which can otherwise call a lot of attention to their use.

Longly doesn’t hide the fact that the huge pillar of black, boiling smoke rising in the background of many of the scenes in the final third of the film is actually coming from a foundry, rather than from the result of war violence. But it works as a great metaphor. So does the snowball fight that he films, again with fast shutter speed.

Even the credit roll of this film is worth mentioning. Credits rolled out from right to left – rather than the traditional bottom to top – which is the same way people in the Arab world read. James Longly’s name entered the screen like an arrow, dragging all of the key roles behind him, carving a solitary path through the black screen and pulling the rest of the crew, which contain a raft of translators behind him. How the hell do you make a film like this with everything filtered through translaters?

I about fell over when I saw Basil Shadid’s name come up in the credits as the post-production supervisor on this film. I know Basil from having hired him to film the second BizJam conference we did a few years ago. More recently, he earned an additional camera credit on Shine for filming interviews at the May 6 event. Nice work Basil! I’m proud to know someone who played a role in making this incredible film.

Check this out. Some clever engineers at a company called Eye-Fi have apparently figured out how to cram wi-fi capabilities into a class 6 SD card, and are claiming that this allows you to automatically download photos and video as you capture it. They call it “Endless Memory” mode. But what snaps me to attention about this isn’t the fact that I might no longer need to carry a fistful of SD cards on shoots. What’s really interesting is the possibility that one person with a video camera and an iPhone could theoretically broadcast in an almost live mode. That is, using these, it should be possible to download video as you shoot it to your iPhone, and have your iPhone configured to then automatically post video to your blog or social media.

Obviously most people wouldn’t want to dump everything as they shoot it straight to their Facebook profile. Everybody needs an editor. But if you were filming, say, in a sensitive situation where there was a chance of having your “film” confiscated, this could give you a lot of peace of mind. Like if you were James Longly filming last year’s election in Iran, for example (provided he were using a camera like my JVC HM100, which uses class 6 SD cards). How cool would it be to just shoot shoot shoot while posting your files to your hard drive back home?

Last night I screened The Burden of Dreams at my place, joined by Seattle documentary filmmaker Nassim Assefi and Seattle Film Institute cinematography instructor Steven Bradford and a few other friends. The 1982 documentary by Les Blank is a cutting portrayal of legendary filmmaker Warner Herzog during his 5-year quest to make Fitzcaraldo. I’m not keen on “making of” movies, but this one is far more about Herzog as a character than his film.

A psychotherapist once told me that to understand the behavior of people, including ourselves, it can be useful to think of them as actors starring in their own movies. The problem is, people don’t know when to stop acting. They get attached to the roles they define for themselves. Even when the results don’t make any sense or are harmful to themselves and others, they just keep playing out their parts, long after any adult in charge would have yelled “Cut!”

This film is a journey into Herzog’s vision of himself as a hero in his own movie, literally, with no one to tell him no. Except his film’s investors, who waste no time in doing so when it becomes clear Herzog is making what my psychotherapist pal might have called “poor choices.”

Everything continues to go wrong for Herzog, in large part because he insists on putting the cast and crew into extreme conditions of isolation and physical stress, in the name of extracting more authentic performances out of them. But it’s more than that. It’s as if Herzog WANTS to spend 5 years in the jungle. “I don’t want to live in a world where there are no lions, where there are not people like lions,” he says in one interview. In the jungle Herzog sees “overwhelming misery and fornication and lack of order. Even the stars look like a mess” here, he says, in his frighteningly ordered German accept.

I got so distracted by my repulsion for Herzog that I forgot to pay close attention to how the documentary was made. Nevertheless, I managed to come away with one useful observation, made by Steven. He reminded us that this film was made during a period when filmmakers, for the first time in history, came into the possession of film cameras that could also record sync sound while at the same time being small enough to shoulder-hold. That represented a technological breakthrough, just as momentous as the one many of us are buzzing about today with the arrival of HDSLRs like the Canon 5d. Directors like Herzog felt suddenly freed of the constraints of big studios. They were breaking free. Or at least, they were trying.

After the film, Steven showed us this 3:58 clip on YouTube, as an example of just how effective the studios have been in keeping directors out of the jungle and safely delivering earth-shaking apocalypse, on time and on budget. Check it out. Almost made me nostalgic for the sound of Herzog’s real steam ship crunching into real rocks. Almost.

Lara and Andrew get first look at completed Shine

Today’s the late deadline for SIFF, a deadline I’ve been aiming to hit for months. Sure enough, I did it with about 15 hours to spare. I hit the submit button sending Shine on it’s way via withoutabox.com at about 9am this morning, after a successful all-night render of the final file (it took more than 12 hours to render on my 2.5gz Macbook Pro – a sign that I need to start looking at a Mac desktop that has more editing horsepower).

The final film is exactly 24 minutes long. It took 8 months from beginning to end (although it’s not fully over yet, since we still have to produce a DVD with extras and such). I spent most of the day yesterday fussing with title slates, credit roll tweaks, and audio transitions. After I made the SIFF deadline this morning, I went down to the Biznik office and gave Lara and Andrew the first private screening of the final film. They liked it!

It feels great to have it complete. I’m sending a big thank you to everyone involved, especially the more than 100 volunteers and financial contributors who made the film possible. You guys rock.

Northwest Film Forum is bringing director Zachary Levy to Seattle to screen his documentary film Strongman. It plays from Jan. 8 – 14 at the Forum, and the director will be in attendance on opening Friday and Saturday. I’ll be attending the Friday 7pm screening.

But here’s what’s really cool: Zachary Levy is teaching a pair of documentary workshops while he’s in town, one of them about my favorite style of documentary, cinema verite. I’ve signed up for both of them. Here’s the descriptions:

Strengthen your documentary filming techniques with visiting filmmaker Zachary Levy (Strongman). Each day, Zach will show clips demonstrating different documentary styles, and then lead a hands-on workshop. With Zach’s direction, students will arrange lighting set-ups and practice camera techniques. Saturday will be spent simulating verite style shooting, while Sunday is entirely focused on interview-based portraiture set-ups. Students are encouraged to bring clips from their own work as a starting point for solving the kinds of challenges they might face in the field.

Documentary Camera—Verite

Saturday, Jan 9, 12–3pm
Tuition: $35/WigglyWorld member, $40/general
Max Attendance: 12
Register

Documentary Camera—The Interview

Sunday, Jan 10, 12–3pm
Tuition: $35/WigglyWorld member, $40/general
Max Attendance: 12
Register