A couple months ago, documentary filmmaker Ian McCluskey moved into the vacant desk across from me at OPB. He is best known for his two full-length documentaries, Eloquent Nude and Voyagers, but over the years he’s done a wide array of video work for OPB and his non-profit, NW Documentary.
The very first film he ever made, Echo of Water Against Rocks, was the product of a documentary class he took while earning a masters in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. He got an incomplete in the class, but the story eventually aired on OPB.
The story of how Ian went from learning to shoot at U of O (where he forgot to bring a tripod to his first filmed interview on the Warm Springs Reservation) to making a living as a filmmaker is worth hearing (Kickstarters, freelance work, grant applications, soliciting all manner of in-kind donations and living off “very meager savings” were all part of the process).
But I want to focus on one short, experimental piece he did called Summer Snapshot. It’s a 10-minute short he shot using a Super 8 camera and some of the last Kodachrome film on the shelves before Kodak discontinued it. The full piece is password protected, but the trailer above allows you to see the rich, nostalgic quality of the video he produced.
He used authentic interviews and the Super 8 footage of a recreated scene to approximate the memory he and others have of swimming in the Sandy River and, more generally, “the love of friends and a summer day.” Here’s how he explained the value of using vintage film to tap into a universal feeling of nostalgia:
“You can no longer go anywhere and get Kodachrome, and all through the late 40s, 50s and 60s – an entire generation of home movies – people’s memories were captured in this format, and they all had this sunny, golden look, which created a sense of nostalgia. We think of those years as a kind of golden era, and they kind of were that way because they looked that way.”
The film was shot in 18 frames per second, creating “a stuttery look that’s kind of half not real,” he said. Using the older, cheaper Super 8 camera, he said, it’s hard to hold focus and use depth of field.
“Everything is a little blurry, a little in and out of focus,” he said. “But if I were to see a 4K video of a kid on a tricycle and a Kodachrome of a kid on a tricycle, something feels more nostalgic, precious or memory-like, almost held in amber with Kodachrome. When we dream or remember we don’t remember in sharp focus. I tried to take everyone’s memory of what they think a trip to the Sandy River might look like. It was like my memory but there was never a moment that was that nostalgic or that perfect. That was kind of like the memory I wanted to have.”
The entire film was shot without a tripod. In the trailer, the opening shot of the car coming down the road and the later shot of the car at 0:33 were filmed using a handheld camera while sitting in the back of a pickup truck.
The lens flare at 0:24 and 0:36 0:38 was purposeful:
“I was really obsessively thinking about memory and how memory gets recorded,” he said. “Our human eye doesn’t naturally see lens flare, yet somehow that dreamy quality is so pleasing to the human eye because it looks sun kissed. It’s almost impossible to get lens flare with the lenses today. But here I think it created that curtain, that lace curtain, so you’re not looking right at something real but through the lace curtain of Kodachrome.”
He created the split screen shots at 0:24 and 0:33 by using an old projector and filming the projected image with a DSLR camera. Then he put two of those shots side by side.
The film made no money, but it was accepted into 50 different festivals around the world including Tribeca Film Festival.