Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 54) CLOSE-UP (continued from page 27) ALEXIS KRASILOVSKY the Roy W. Dean Award set us in full motion. For that interview, we used a Nagra tape recorder with 1/4” reel-to-reel tape. We didn’t even consider going for an image, because to ensure any real quality on location, it would have had to have been shot on 16mm film, which was out of the question, financially, on a twohour interview. Seventy interviews and two decades later, I’m happy to say that shooting most of them on MiniDV made the entire project feasible. With only airfare and a tiny Canon MiniDV camera, I could still afford to go to Paris and interview Agnes Varda about how the new technology has allowed her to do her own camerawork, when she feels like it, on her more recent productions. Considering the fact that this great independent director started out as a photographer, being able to let go of 35mm motion picture cameras and shoot with MiniDV is integral to her artistry and self-expression. It’s been 12 years since you made your last film. What were some of the old technical issues that you no longer had to face? What were the new technical issues? I’m not sure which was more painful, editing at a 16mm flatbed in an unheated New York City office on the graveyard shift — pulling off my mittens to make a splice — or digitizing dozens of hours in an unheated house in Echo Park with no end in sight, without enough funding in place to placate my digitizing staff. I didn’t have to worry about whether the light meter was calibrated, but I did sometimes worry about whether the video footage was overexposed if we didn’t use a monitor to double-check it. And, finally, the digital intermediate that EFilm donated to the 35mm print — which Kodak and Deluxe also donated to the project — was so wonderfully liberating technically. In the old days, I used to go through several 16mm answer prints and many, many discussions with the timers to get the right compromise between warm and cold colors, for example; whereas today it’s possible to go for several important tonalities all in the same frame at the same time. I’m blown away! You’re leaving soon to screen the film at Camerimage in Lödz, Poland — the only film festival in the world dedicated to directors of photography and very well attended by leading cinematographers. What message do you hope those viewers come away with? I’d like the movers and shakers of film industries here and abroad to acknowledge the work of such top female directors of photography as Ellen Kuras, ASC, Nancy Schreiber, ASC, Amy Vincent, ASC, Sandi Sissel, ASC and Lisa Rinzler in the U.S.; Akiko Ashizawa, JSC in Japan; Jan Kenny, ACS in Australia; Zoe Dirse, CSC in Canada; Agnes Godard, AFC in France; Astrid Heubrandtner, AAC in Austria; and camerawomen in other countries, such as Hilda Mercado in Mexico and Rozette Ghaderi in Iran. It should not be so difficult for today’s camera operators to move up and get work. I hope that their stories will also inspire the next generation to pick up cameras and tell their stories. DV You can find more information about Krasilovsky’s project at www.womenbehindthecamera.com. www.dv.com 1,500 pages in all — and having over 99 hours of material digitized. I tried to put together a script that was as visual as it was meaningful in terms of stories camerawomen told about their lives and their work. My first draft was more than 200 pages long. It took over a year to get our 2-1/2-hour rough cut down to 90 minutes. It was painful to leave out so many of them in order to focus on pacing and meaning. What were the biggest technical hurdles in post? Getting the money to pay for countless PAL-to-NTSC conversions was one of the hardest things we faced. Digitizing over 100 hours of material in the middle of winter in a house without central heating was also a challenge. Moving from one version of Final Cut Pro to another was an enormous hurdle. Fortunately, Big Time Motion Picture Company came to our rescue on how to survive without losing our digitized footage. And constructing the end title sequence, which is a composite of photos, graphic elements such as color bars, digital video, 16mm, 35mm and Betacam imagery, and a five-minute crawl was one of the biggest challenges. I HOPE THEIR STORIES WILL ALSO INSPIRE THE NEXT GENERATION TO PICK UP CAMERAS AND TELL THEIR STORIES. How did you collaborate with your editor, Katey Bright, and what solutions did Final Cut Pro offer over others? Using Final Cut Pro, I’d give Katey the script, then notes, and then we’d sit down for several weeks going over each shot and each sequence in terms of pacing, often to the frame. Later in the year or so of editing it was often enough to view the film together and give Katey written notes on what to fix, replace, extend, etc., and then watch it together to confer on what worked and what still needed tweaking or further development. Subtitling the film in eight different languages (French, Spanish, German, Gujarati, Farsi, Korean, Chinese and Japanese) was extremely challenging, since all we really knew were French and Spanish at best, but due to the flexibility of Final Cut Pro, it was achievable. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken had I had to rely on 16mm optical printers and hi-con tests to change German to English, as I did in 1984 with my film Exile! Often the biggest challenge was simply pushing ourselves beyond the limit in order to finish a film of this magnitude. After so many endless weeks, often with all-nighters, I’m so glad that our editor, Katey Bright, won an award for her documentary editing on this production. She deserves every inch of it! During the course of making your film, did new technology arise that allowed you to take new creative directions? Allow you more creative freedom? We actually started the first interview over a decade before 54 dv january 2008 http://www.womenbehindthecamera.com http://www.dv.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.