Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 6) LETTERS GATES CORRECTIONS I really enjoyed the way Dan Frankel told the story of our film, The Gates, in your close-up on Albert Maysles [“Park Art,” DV Aug.]. However there are several mistakes in the article. The article states that I edited the film for a year. It actually was over two years from beginning to end—archival footage and new footage was taken from a mass of 600 hours and made into a 90-minute film from 2005 to 2007. I was misquoted as saying that five percent of the footage is Varicam, when in fact it was closer to 400 hours of shot footage, and a good 30 percent of the final film is high-def. (Archival footage makes up only 20 minutes of the film.) It states that we used a Sony DSRPD170 on helicopter runs. We did no chopper shots with the PD170; the [aerial] shots that are in The Gates were shot on Kodak film by the great Buddy Squires and Bob Richman. And, unfortunately, there was no mention of the person I edited this monster with, our co-director, Matthew Prinzing. I was quoted as saying the project was done for less than $60,000, but that’s wrong—at the time, that was NO FOOD, NO MATCHES NO ELECTRICITY? THE SCIENCE CHANNEL I just read your article on Les Stroud’s Survivorman in the October issue of DV. It’s a great article, but it doesn’t answer one pretty obvious question. How does Les charge his batteries in the wild? Geoff Parr, director of film production, The Glendon Association Fresh from a Survivorman stint in the South Pacific’s Cook Islands, Les Stroud e-mailed us his reply: “I take in a whack of lithium batteries—seven to nine 5-hour batteries for the Z1Us, and nine or 10 for the smaller cameras.” our budget, and hence we needed to resort to crude means to reconstitute the original camera reel from which scenes could be created. Lastly, the article says the film blends old footage with the project (Christo and JeanneClaude’s Gates exhibition in New York’s Central Park) that happened in 2003. The film has footage from 1980; the project came back to life in 2003, and we filmed until February, 2005, when the project was finally realized. I apologize for my strictness to facts, but it’s the basis for what we live and breathe as documentarians, like lips to a lover. When I first met Al, we were the only two people nuts enough to use DV. Everyone thought we were crazy. I had understood its importance in 1996, shooting with one of the first Sony VX1000s. I met Al a year later, and he was dabbling with DV too. He was making a movie on 16mm—not by choice, mind you, that was how things still were done in the doc world. Those were the unofficial days of our partnership, shooting weddings and crazy stories about séances in Nyack, N.Y. In 2000 we made the first TV-direct cinema series on DV called With The Filmmaker—those lessons and intelligence figured into The Gates seven years later. DV is the new standard—the same filmmaker who laughed at us for using DV 10 years ago called Al up to shoot DV for her. I’m happy Dan’s article celebrates that spirit. Thank you for paying attention to us and our work. Antonio Ferrera, director, The Gates DV welcomes your letters at letters@dv.com. Letters are considered for publication unless sender notes otherwise. They may be edited for clarity, content and space. 6 dv december 2007 www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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