Author: Amanda

“All Things Must Pass” is an interview-style documentary film where the story of the rise and eventual fall of the Tower Records chain of stores is told by the company owner and former employees. The significance that Tower had wasn’t just on a handful of music enthusiasts in California–the company had a much more profound impact on the music industry itself, and that story is told through this film as the now departed Russ Soloman recounts how he found his way in the business.

For me, I found the warm lighting and color choices that were used, almost as if to match the archival footage from the 60s and 70s, to also evoke feelings of warmth and emotion. I grew up in the birth place of Tower Records, Sacramento, and lived there until high school. I’m not entirely sure that people outside of Northern California feel the same tie to these stores that I did, but the scenes during the 1970s of high school students at the Watt Avenue location probably include my parents. I vividly remember going to that store with them in the 1980s and 90s. When I moved to Chico for high school, I spent my lunch breaks browsing CDs at the Tower there with my friends.

This extra wide opening shot of the first Tower Records location in Sacramento establishes a sense of place. We see the large strip mall complex that’s pretty much taken over by Tower and the large parking lot it has, which tells us that’s how busy the location could get. And even though the lot is empty, there’s this warm yellow glow from the inside that makes it feel like the lights are on and someone’s home. It feels like home.

The next shot in the opening sequence is a tighter shot of the red Tower Records sign above the front doors. The sign is pulsing slowly, just like it always did. The camera pans down to the two glass doors covering the entrance, and they’re both propped wide open. The camera begins to move closer to the entrance, and the viewer can see a neon sign that says “classical,” and rows upon rows of empty shelves.

It stops there. Instead of going into the store and seeing the size of it and the rows of empty shelves, we see a cutaway of Russ Soloman’s wallet on his dresser and hear his voice begin telling a story as a woman packs a suitcase. He’s explaining how young people used to collect music, when suddenly, we pan from the dark into the empty record store on what I think must be some kind of slider.

The camera passes through a couple of rows of empty record shelves before it finds our interview subject, Russ Solomon, in what I’d say is a pretty wide shot. He’s sitting in a chair for his interview with his entire body in the frame, inside the Watt Avenue Tower Records store between rows of empty CD shelves labeled “rock/pop.” I couldn’t dream of interviewing someone more in their element. I absolutely love this shot. The slider that they use going into this shot, for me, conveyed a sense of anticipation, and I think for those unfamiliar with the store also helped contextualize the size of the location. The lighting is a combination of natural and unnatural. The natural light coming in from the behind the blinds and the way it hits the light-colored wood, as well as the warmth coming from the sign behind him are all elements that work well here.

Another great idea I picked up on in this film was how to handle visuals when your interview subject is telling a story that took place decades ago. This documentary uses a lot of great old footage, and we should all hope to be so lucky, but another trick they used was showing the scene in modern day, and then matching the frame to a historic photo. In describing how he first got started, Soloman mentions Tower Theater (a historic landmark in Sacramento) and mentions his father had a drug store there. The filmmakers went out and shot a beautiful modern era sequence of the tower theater to show as b-roll while Soloman says all of this, and this sequence ends with this particular shot of the building:

This shot sits on the screen for a couple of seconds and then it switches to this historic one instead:

The impact of doing something like this is it transitions the viewer back in time with the storyteller, who in this case is the interview subject. It’s an interesting way to get around having a lack of old footage too, since it was far more engaging to watch than to just see one or two old photos. This way, you still got a feel for the building and setting but you also got the point that it was important in the 1940s as well.

There were a number of old stills they incorporated in creative ways, and I think it’s worth showing a couple here for inspiration because they present some better-looking options than simply filling the frame with the shot. I also just think they look cool.

You can watch “All Things Must Pass” with a University of Oregon or Multnomah County Library card on Kanopy here.

–Amanda Rhoades

“Period. End of Sentence.” is a 2018 documentary short (which just won an Oscar, by the way) about a group of Indian women who receive a machine that enables them to make sanitary napkins, and therefore start to address some of the issues that menstruation had caused for them. The film is shot in the reflexive style, with the film makers asking the subjects questions as the cameras roll and leaving those conversations in the final cut.

Once the women in the film learn how to use the machine and begin making their own pads, they come up with an idea to start selling them door to door, since there’s such a stigma in their culture and women often don’t want to buy pads in front of men. This introduces the unanswered question of this film, which is “will these women be successful in their business endeavor?” There’s a second part to this conflict as well, that may not be as clear but is still present. That second conflict lies in whether or not these women, or all women in India, can start to rise up out of the patriarchal society and create new roles for themselves. This is alluded to when the young girls are talking about dropping out of school when they get their periods and also when one older woman is talking about her friend who’s a police officer and people know her for what she does, not her who her father is. She says in that interview that the female police officer has the best life because of this.

Apparently, you can’t take screenshots in Netflix. This is especially unfortunate because I did it the entire way through the film and only realized once I went to upload them that they were all black, so I’ll do the best I can without.

The film looks very cinematic in terms of the color, but there is an element of shakiness to the footage that makes it feel authentic as well. In the darker spaces inside homes, the shadows are deep. Outside, the light is not warm but very light as if it were a bright and cloudy much of the time. The shots of people are use a lot of unique angles that I enjoyed, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re the type of thing a film professor might critique. The angles were were often a bit lower or a lot more off to the side during interviews than we’re generally taught to do. It’s consistent enough throughout the piece that it appears to be a style and not a mistake, though, and I really thought they added a fresh take to an old format.

At 12:40 the videographer does an excellent job of getting ahead of the action. The camera is set up inside of a dark room before the women open up a door from the outside and walk across the frame as the space fills with daylight. The only thing my eye was craving here that I didn’t get to see was after they walked across the space they were opening another door, and I would have very much liked to see them all exit the frame as well.

The cameraperson gets very up close and personal to the women in this film, which is shocking considering how shy they all are about the subject matter, but it’s also what I admire and think we could learn the most from. So often when I’m shooting I feel like I need to catch everything that’s happening within the entire frame or it won’t make sense, but here the rely mostly on tight and medium shots to tell the story. Around the 18 minute mark, when the woman speaking says “Now tell me, who wants to change things?” the music comes in and we see hands exchanging pads for money, it feels so much more exciting than it would if it were just composed as a wide shot.

“Period. End of Sentence.” is streaming now on Netflix.

–Amanda Rhoades

“Surfer Dan” is a short film created by Camp4 Collective, for the outdoor clothing company Merrell. Camp4 Collective is a group of photographers and videographers who produce “everything from 60 second product videos to half hour documentaries,” according to their LinkedIn page. Their work is often produced with the sponsorship of outdoor companies, like this one, but they’ve also had clients from like Apple. I found their short video “Surfer Dan” interesting because it follows an unlikely adventurer, which is something I aspire to do in my own work as become more comfortable producing video.

The film opens with a bird’s eye view of the ice-filled Lake Superior on the coast of Michigan, and then it cuts to Dan, our main character, scraping the ice off of his from a shot filmed from the inside of the van. The next shot is him loading it with his dogs and surfboards. These jump cuts appear to be intentional, like they could be showing process of getting ready to go find some waves. Before the title even appears, we see him carrying a surfboard across the snow and even diving into the water between chunks of ice.

The coloring has almost a blue-tint to it, conveying a cold feeling for the viewer. This kind of scene-setting and letting the viewer know what this guy goes right up-front works for this piece because it hooks us in. Surfing in ice is not all that common, and even the guys doing it in National Geographic aren’t thought of as the kinds of people you’d expect to see surfing in the dead of winter in Michigan. So, who is the kind of person who would do something so crazy? That’s why the viewer wants to keep watching—to find out who this guy is and what he’s doing out there. The unanswered question could be “who is this person?” or “will he catch a wave?” But it could also be “will he survive the brutal conditions?”

The filmmakers then use a few cutaways in and around Dan’s home to begin to introduce him. While showing these shots, they’re also transitioning into a sort of slice-of-life for Dan, who we see boiling water in his kitchen in the morning and getting dressed for surfing and playing with his dogs. In one shot, his dog stands on top of a propped up surf board while Dan walks around the room while talking about what he wears when he does out in the icy water.

The image stuck with me because even though the light coming from the window may be over exposed, and even though the room is a mess and we’re not even seeing Dan’s face in this, it feels like an environmental portrait almost because shows so much information about who he is. The filmmakers then use a few cutaways in and around Dan’s home to give viewers a better idea of the main and only character in this story. We see close ups of photos of him surfers in his home, medium shots of him interacting with his dog, and boiling water in his kitchen, and a shot of his vehicle license plate that says “UPSURFR” on his old beat-up van. All of this just conveys that this guy, in Michigan, of all places, lives for surfing. Shooting this license plate while Dan loads a surfboard into his van is the very definition of what my professor means when he says “don’t shoot the donut, shoot the donut hole.” These are the kinds of details that make the story.

Moving beyond the visuals, this film contains both an internal and external conflict. Externally, we’re following Dan on his quest to find some good waves in icy Lake Superior and there’s an unanswered question of whether or not Surfer Dan will get to surf. The way its shot feels like we’re with him on one day and we want to know if he’s going to find good waves. But there’s another conflict he touches on during the stand-up interview during all of this when he says, “surfing saved my life.” We don’t know Dan’s entire story while watching this film, but it’s at this point where he says the sport saved his life that we realize his motivations are much deeper than they appear on the surface. 

When he talks about how he used to drink and then quit and started surfing, or how someone can be having a hard time until he takes them surfing, and we realize this is how Dan copes with the challenges he’s faced in life. He also mentions wanted to bring people out surfing with him, so he can share this happiness he’s found. As the film concludes we see Dan happily jumping off this snow-covered pier into these crashing waves and then it transitions to him paddling out into the ice-filled water.

— Amanda Rhoades