cprofita – MMJ V

Following Curiosity Onto The Last Train

One of my favorite pieces of advice in the book Telling True Stories was this: “Curiosity is a muscle. The more you use it, the more you can do.”

The piece “Last Train” seems like the direct result of someone’s curiosity: What stories will we find if we interview people on the last train of the night?

It’s hard to find spectacular shots in a mostly vacant train station at the end of the night. But this piece does a nice job of transporting the viewer to that terrible fluorescent lighting of the subway so we can meet a variety of characters and hear their stories.

The shooter captured some nice visual moments by simply being at the train station late at night and using the geometry of the infrastructure.

This is a nice one at 0:08:

The empty spaces help tell the story of what the city feels like at the end of a long day.

I really like the shot at 0:24 where the only motion within the frame is the empty escalator.

Later, at 0:50, we see empty seats inside the train car, and the only motion in the frame is the world passing by outside the windows. At 0:54 the doors open, but no one walks through them.

The shooter did an impressive job of capturing the conversation that starts at 1:05. Sound leads picture as we hear the conversation before we see the people talking. But then we see tight shots of a man and woman – back and forth – as they have an animated (possibly drunk) discussion on the moving train. Then, at 1:17 there is a seamless match-action cut to a wide shot of the same two people – mid-discussion. The scene makes you feel like you’re there, and the sound is surprisingly clear for being recorded on a moving train.

The shooter also managed to find beauty in this world. I love the soft focus shot at 1:24 where the reflections of city lights flicker on the outside of the train window as the camera steadily tracks someone sitting inside. I wonder if this could have been shot using a GoPro attached to the outside of the train.

The framing in the interview on the train at 1:45 is unusual. The subject is looking out of the frame and doesn’t have much nose room. But it feels excusable because you’re on the train. Oblique angles feel more normal in a train car, where you often don’t want to be facing people.

The story at 2:14 is the kind of gem you can’t expect to find on the last train, but you hope you will. A couple who remember developing a relationship on the train, on “a subway date.”

The framing of the man talking at 2:35 is awesome. It feels like the way you would interact with someone on a train. He’s standing, grabbing onto a pole and handle for support and swaying as the train moves.

The cutaway at 2:41 to overlapping images from inside and outside the moving train feels like the perfect segue to the next shot from outside the train. It feels as if we are walking through the walls of the train onto the platform.

In the long shot at the end, the fluorescent lights and their reflection create enough motion within the frame to hold the viewer’s attention from 3:04 to 3:20 as we watch the last train pull away.

“A whole bunch of good ol’ Canadian hockey in under one minute”

Hockey Sounds from Scott Duffy on Vimeo.

I’m not into hockey, but I love the way this piece delivers the sound and the feel of so many hockey-related things with quick cuts and great audio. This type of edit seems like it could be a useful tool in stories where you’re trying to give people a sense of place and movement without a full scene. The fast pace and curious noises pull the viewer into the piece in a sequence that would make a great intro or transition.

In the first second – from 0:00-0:01 – the filmmaker crams in three tight shots: a flood light flipping on, filling a water bottle, and sharpening a blade of a hockey skate (love that shot). Each of the shots feature movement and sound, giving a rapid-fire feel to the piece right off the bat. The opening cuts move so fast that the shot of the spinning roll of tape at 0:06 feels long because it lasts one full second.

I like how the shots vary between hands and objects and faces. It’s a lot to follow, but I think that is what makes it visually interesting. If too many of the shots were just objects, it might not hold the viewer’s attention for a full minute.

At 0:08 there’s an interesting sequence that goes from a medium shot to a tight shot and then back and forth again:

It’s four cuts in less than four seconds, but because it goes back and forth on the same guy, it draws extra attention. It seems like a fun way to highlight a fast-paced action without cutting together a full match-action sequence. I think these jump cuts work in the context of the piece.

There’s another sequence that starts at 0:15 that makes quick work of patching a hole in a backyard ice rink in your backyard. We see a tight shot of a guy’s finger in the ice, then a wide shot of a guy collecting snow in a pan, a tight shot of stirring the snow, a tight shot of scraping it over the ice, and then an overhead shot of the guy on the ice.

That sequence is played out by 0:19, and then we get a breather with a “long” cut lasting five seconds with a bit of music before diving back back into more rapid-fire cuts that race through the process of making an ice rink.

A few shots are recycled – the foosball table, siren and washing machine stand out, which could represent hockey games and the subsequent washing of the uniform. If you need to cram a whole hockey season into a minute or compress time in any story, this is one way to do it. As the filmmaker describes it in the Vimeo post, it’s “a whole bunch of good ol’ Canadian hockey in under one minute.”

Ian McCluskey’s Last Hurrah With Kodachrome

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.

Profile: Steve Amen, Creator of Oregon Field Guide

Steve Amen is the creator of the OPB television show Oregon Field Guide, which has remained one of the highest rated shows in the PBS system for its 28 years on the air.

Amen is preparing to retire from Oregon Public Broadcasting after shepherding the show through hundreds of stories.

I’ve always enjoyed the show’s journalistic style, but I’ve wondered what film-making strategies have made it such a success. Their stories have taken on environmental issues like invasive species and wolf reintroduction but also ambitious explorations of the Mt. St. Helens crater, the little-known slot canyon nicknamed “Valhalla” and the ice caves that have formed on Mt. Hood as its glaciers melt from the inside out.

Amen said the show has won dozens of awards over the years using some basic storytelling principles, but all of the stories they tell aim to be objective and stick to the basic tenants of journalism.

Before he started working at OPB, he worked in television news.

“With my news background and OPB’s mission, I thought it wasn’t our job to tell our viewers how to think,” he said. “We have never in 28 years taken a position on something.”

His philosophy is ‘Don’t tell me. Show me.’

“We try to find people who really know what they’re talking about,” he said. “We’re not giving a report. We’re telling a story. We’re taking the viewers along with us, not talking at them. We have respect for our viewers, that they’re willing to take the time to think about these issues.”

To tell a great Oregon Field Guide story, he said, the pre-production process is critical to find great, articulate characters who can help tell the story.

“By telling their story, we can tell a bigger story,” Amen said.

One example: The story of 98-year-old Frankie Dugal, who lives without electricity in eastern Oregon and makes ropes out of horse hair.

In this story, the viewer really gets to know this woman and see her process for making horse hair. We also see her firing up her wood stove, riding a horse and talking about the unnecessary conveniences of modern life like microwaves.

Shooters for the program use a lot of sequencing to step viewers through the stories. But the show rarely uses music, Amen said.

“We’ll only use it if we don’t have any natural sound, like when a story is mostly archival or you’re spending 30 minutes in a glacial cave with dripping water sounds,” he said. “You can only take that for so long before you have to pee.”

Amen said using music runs the risk of editorializing the story, and he’d rather hear natural sound – especially outdoors.

“I won’t want music when I’m outdoors,” he said. “I’d rather hear hooves on the ground, boots in the woods, breaking twigs. Natural sound makes for better storytelling. We can take people on a journey and give them a better sense of what’s it’s like. It puts a huge amount of pressure on our shooters and producers. But it makes a huge difference.”

The show does employ narration, Amen said, because cinema verite is “really, really hard.”

“There are times when you need that transition or the interpreter who breaks down a complicated issue for you,” he said. “That’s where narration comes in.”

Ultimately, he wants the show to bridge the urban-rural divide, to find characters who can give people a better understanding of what life is like around the state.

“These are good people. You need to meet them,” he said. “And here’s what they have to say.”