DIRECTOR'S BLOG

What a way to cap off two incredible weeks in Amsterdam. We’ve come home with the first ever IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling for HIGHRISE/Out MY Window.

At the award ceremony in the stunning Tuschinski Theatre of downtown Amsterdam, the president of the jury, Alexandre Brachet reported: ‘“The project draws its strength when viewed in depth and at length. The meetings in dozens of countries, from Bangalore and Beirut to Toronto, Canada are all beautiful and the design of the piece resonates with the stories. Photos, video, audio and interactivity all work in seamless harmony towards telling the stories in a compelling way.” The other two jury members were Zach Wise and Antoinette Hoes.

The DocLab competition category rocked with 17 amazing projects: from non-linear guru Florian Thalhofer’s Planet Galata: A Bridge in Istanbul, to 3 very fine NFB/interactive projects (Testtube, This Land, Welcome to Pine Point), to the Arcade Fire runaway hit The Wilderness Downtown, to the university student project in the Appalachians, Soul of Athens, and of course the two fantastic nominees: the visually lush California is a Place, and the totally DIY  Soul Patron (shot, edited and programmed by the author as part of his masters in applied science).

Variety, IndieWire, DocSpace, MovieCityNews Filmmaker Magazine all covered the full IDFA awards.

I spent much of my time in Amsterdam at the lovely Brakke Grond, where we have our installation of Out My Window until January 9th, but I did get into the IDFA movie house a few times to see some great films, mostly revolving around the politics/technology theme. I caught most of the big double IDFA award winner (dutch category and feature-length) Position Among the Stars, which has an opening shot that rivals that of Manufactured Landscapes in beauty. It’s the third instalment in a (decade-long-in-the-making) trilogy of family life in Indonesia by Leonard Rete Helmrich, a cinematographer/director who built steadycam contraptions with low-tech solutions (bamboo etc) to create a technique he calls “Single Shot Cinema.” He often uses long, uninterrupted shots, with the camera moving freely around, surprising us with unusual points of view and sudden glances sideways, sometimes even to follow a fleeing cockroach in extreme close-up. The camera as a living, curious and very much involved entity.

Continuing the politics/tech theme, I also saw the Danish Blood in the Mobile, which investigates how Nokia and other electronics companies are fuelling a deadly war in the Congo (by purchasing coltan and other minerals needed for cell phones and electronics from killer warlords). It’s a subject that has been on the media radar for the last decade (Peter Wintonick and I pointed to it back in 2003 in our web-companion to Seeing is Believing: handicams, huamn rights and the news) and yet the multi-nationals continue to rake in huge profits, and to dodge justice as millions of people in Congo continue to die. The film wisely suggests that there’s a solution: to demand more transparent supply chains (see here). For a more uplifting portrayal of the Congo, I went to the heart-warming Kinshasa Symphony, which came in fourth for the IDFA Audience award. (The award went to the oscar-short-listed Waste Land, also about repurposing recycled materials from a garbage dump to create participatory art. I caught Waste Land at Hot Docs last year, it’s a must-see).

I was happy to see a the “talk-show” live interview with fellow Canadians Luc Coté, Patricio Henrique about their urgent film You Don’t Like the Truth: Four Days Inside Guantanamo. They talked about the struggle they had to finance their film, based on  7 hours of surveillance footage (shot on VHS) of the interrogation of Canadian Omar Khadr held at Guantanamo, for alleged war crimes he committed when he was 15 years old. No financiers would touch the film when they were making it, yet its now playing a huge role in pointing a spotlight on how the Canadian government has betrayed its own citizen, to the hands of torturers and sadists. The timing of the release of the film is spot-on. In October 2010, Omar Khadr had just plead guilty to all charges, part of a plea bargain that would get him an eight-year sentence instead of life in prison. This makes him the first person to be convicted as a war criminal since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the first child soldier since Nuremburg to be found guilty of war crimes.. The filmmakers showed the film to a room full of judges in the Netherlands last week, and are now touring with the film around the world. And their highly-deserved IDFA Special Jury prize will no doubt give the film a good boost.

Worth mentioning too is the last film I saw, My Reincarnation, by Jennifer Fox. For the last twenty years, her camera has witnessed the difficult relationship of a Tibetan Llama, Rinpoche and his resistant son (born and raised in Italy), who is said to be a reincarnation of Rinpoche’s uncle. Jennifer’s trust in life and fate unfolding before her camera (over 2 decades!) is breathtaking, and the film, a full 2 hours in length, takes you for a huge emotional, spiritual ride.

And finally, while IDFA is all about the films, the filmmakers, the parties and the fun, what really blew me away was the audiences. IDFA 2010 boasts an incredible total of 180,000 visits to the festival, up 15,000 from last year. As a maker primarily for the internet these days, I appreciate the direct communication I have with people who see our work on-line every day. The immediacy of twitter and social media is profound. But  what IDFA gave me, was the chance to meet hundreds of audience members face-to-face, and nothing beats that.  During my live cinema screening of Out My Window, audiences called out, cheered, reacted, laughed and applauded – all in real time, and I could feel their breath. It was a high that only live cinema can give you. And in my many, many hours at the Brakke Grond, I witnessed hundreds of audience members interacting with the installation as well as the kiosk computer version of the web-site itself. It was the ultimate in user-testing. I saw how things really worked and what could be improved (for example, two-days into the installation we added vinyl lettered instructions on the floor  for the motion detector spotlight triggers). But over and over, audiences approached me to tell me how much they loved the HIGHRISE experience, and it was real proof that Out My Window touches the minds and hearts of people from all walks of life: from PhDs, to teenagers, to filmmakers, to new media students to the general public.

The words and energy of one audience member , Willie, will stick with me for a long time. I met her almost daily at various IDFA DocLab events (she got rid of her tv and internet 6 months ago, and now interacts with the world only through free live events in Amsterdam) and she gave me quite a bit of her time explaining what she appreciated about the our project – and life. She said the 360º approach of our project reminded her of spiders, who have  multiple eyes set all around the front of their heads (i did not know that!). She is a self-prononounced “survivalist” and loves wild, foraged foods, and she loves clicking on objects on the internet that reveal a whole world behind them. Fascinating mind, and heart. Thank you IDFA and DocLab, for so much, but mostly for giving me a chance to meet audience-members like Willie.

And see you, Ally Derks, director of IDFA, in Toronto for Hot Docs, for your much-deserved Doc-Mogul Award, for your huge contribution to the documentary community.

HIGHRISE  has had one last meet-up with YELLOWBIRD 360 Vid Cam – this time in Cuba – for the final music vid shoot of OUT MY WINDOW, our web-doc in production about highrise living.

This time, an even more elaborate choreography and blocking, a custom-built version of a song about the highrise neighborhood, 6 musicians and 3 children as backup singers. Explosive.

The song itself is about a neighbourhood east of Havana, called Alamar, the world’s largest public housing project, with over 100,000 residents in over 1,00 buildings in an area of 15 square km.

The neighbourhood is also the cradle of cubano hiphop.

The performers are a poetry – hiphop – art collective called Omni.

The song progresses from a children’s rhyme, to a Manu Chao-esque folk song, into slam poetry into punked out hiphop. With a new musician appearing every 30 seconds or so. This time, we not only shot for the user, we put the user right in the middle of the action, into the centre of the circle, with great action happening all around in all directions.

We’ve learned tons from each shoot and put it into the crafting of the next: from Amsterdam, to Toronto to Havana. We’ve also learned enormously from our collaborators: the great people at Yellowbird Marc and Fabian, Caspar at IDFA whose been a great advisor along the way, and our partners on the Cuba production, Liz Miller (professor at Concordia U in Montreal) as well as Caridad Cumana, our Film Guru and friend in Havana.

We are now exploring new ways to share the material beyond the web – stay tuned for developments!

The Yellowbird/HIGHRISE 360 video camera team strikes again.

This time, a music video shoot on the 15th floor of a highrise in Toronto, with Amchok Gompo, an incredible Tibetan musician. This is part 2 of our collaboration with Yellowbird on our first web-doc, called Out my Window: Views from the Global Highrise, in which we profile interesting residents living in interesting highrise neighborhoods in several locations around the world.

In Toronto, we did a double shoot, following the YB crew with a “flat video” team. Made for a long day, especially for Amchok. For the YB shoot, it was helpful to have an extra DOP’s advice on lighting, and to have a sound recordist’s expertise to get the right balance of voice, instrument and drums.

The shoot took a long time to set up, because of the strong sun bursting in through the misty window. We compensated with the DOP’s lights in the hallway, to even out the shadows. We also covered the window, and brought the iris down on the camera.

After the sparse 360 shoot Amsterdam (only 2 musicians), I was interested in filling out the room with more searchable activity for the user – and that meant more choreography, especially with children. It took three takes to slow them down from running around like wildfire.

We started out with only two musicians, Amchok, and his friend Victor on an african drum. But about an hour into set-up, I remembered that our sound recordist, Mike, is actually an accomplished Brazilian drummer. We asked him, Amchok and Victor if it would be okay to bring in another drum. Everyone agreed, so Mike dashed home and back for his tambourine (Mike’s home was actually visible from Amchok’s window view!).

The shoot required a lot of art direction – where should Amchok look while singing (into the camera or not? – it seems really unnatural to look into a yellow box). And the choreography of  9 people in a smaller room was complex too. Should everyone move in the same direction? That might seem boring for a user. It was tough to direct, during filming, as I was hiding in the kitchen with 4 other crew, not seeing anything at all during the takes. Then, playback is low-rez, slo-mo, unstitched with no sound on a laptop!

After the YB shoot, one of the flatvideo crew almost lamented: “With this new 360 degree video technology, you don’t need a Director of Photography anymore…”

But to use the technology creatively and well, it actually requires a lot of thought and art direction and coordination, understanding how the user will actually experience the material on-line.

So the takeaway from shoot 2 is definitely: in flat video direction, you shoot for the editor; in 360 you shoot for the user.

A screen grab of our test shoot with dutch new tech company Yellowbird yesterday in suburban Amsterdam. We were testing their 360 camera. It’s like google streetview but video. Its a camera with 5 lenses. With special software, the 5 images are stitched together into a sphere. In the special video player, you can use your mouse click around 360 degrees within the image. check out their demo here)

We filmed with upcoming hiphop artist Zanillya, in the Bijlmermeer apartment she was raised in by her father, the lead singer of Boney M.

The shoot is for our project in production, Out My Window, a web-doc that will feature interesting highrise residents from around the world. Residents will show and tell us what they see out their windows and invite us into their homes. We’ll see views from the global highrise. The site will be built out of photography, audio, text and in a few select places, video. We are testing to see if we can integrate yellowbird’s 360 approach into the project.

Its the first documentary material ever recorded on a 360 camera, as far as we know.

Big shout-outs to Caspar Sonnen of IDFA DocLab for setting us up with YellowBird, Graeme and Brendan of  ERA Architects in Toronto and Gordon Zo Cultuur in Holland for getting us connected in the amazing Bijlmermeer.