by David Geffner and Kevin Lewis
Five years may not sound like a long time, but in the world of digital filmmaking with rapidly changing technology, it's a relative eternity. For RESFEST organizers, now celebrating their fifth anniversary with the indie digital film festival that covers the entire globe, miracles continue to issue forth.
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Resfest attendees at New York Luncheon - photo by Elisa Haber
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Spread over three days and four nights at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the 2001 version of RESFEST — Los Angeles unveiled its biggest lineup ever: more than 60 shorts and features, culled from 1,500 submissions. Highlighting five separate shorts programs, with names like "Altered States," "Human Nature," "High Risk," "By Design" and "Directors Club," along with special sections "Cinema Electronica" and "State of the Art Film Titles," this year's festival, in the words of RESFEST director Jonathan Wells, "revisits our original mission of focusing on innovative storytelling, regardless of the production format."
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TIPS - Bobby Roth: Learn early how to hire good people, and trust them. When I was younger, I got into everybody's stuff and wasted a lot of time, and didn't focus on my own job enough. Now, I tend to be way better at just saying, "OK, I've got a great costume designer. I don't have to be looking at every single piece of clothing that every character wears." |
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The low-key experimentation of RESFEST entries was apparent at the opening-night screening and after-party. Ajay Saghal's It's a Shame About Ray, executive produced by Michael Apted, was the lone "traditional narrative" in RESFEST's "Altered States" program. Saghal's comedic, digitally shot tale of one man's efforts to get into heaven featured several prominent TV actors, and looked remarkably polished, considering it was shot with a consumer video camera on a tiny budget. Past RESFEST Audience Choice Winner Mark Osbourne returned with a sly and gentle music video shot for Swedish pop artist Stina
Nordenstam. Keen Yellow Planet was created by Osbourne with Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro, entirely on a G4 Mac and IMAC, and was a clear audience favorite. Another remarkable film, Copy Shop, came from Austrian director Virgil Widrich. The story of a mild-mannered employee who accidentally copies his hand, leading to a spiraling replication, featured 18,000 photocopied digital frames that were animated and photographed with a 35mm camera.
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Michael Apted addresses ResFest filmmakers at Los Angeles Luncheon - photo by Robert Hale
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The DGA's presence at both the New York City and Los Angeles editions of RESFEST 2001 (RESFEST in New York ran October 11–14 at The New School) was a prominent one, continuing the Guild's passionate support of digital independents. On the West Coast, a DGA luncheon for RESFEST filmmakers at Pinot Hollywood, included directors like Gary Walkow (a member of the DGA's Independent Directors Committee) now in post-production on his first digital project.
"Shooting digitally is like eating salted peanuts," Walkow said. "The ease and economy of the medium makes it very hard to stop." Walkow's digital film, Love Machine 4.0, shot under the DGA's Low Budget Agreement, features the same actor playing as many as four characters, often in the same scene.
"It's something we never could have done on a small, indie budget, even five years ago," Walkow said. "But with digital video (DV), compositing is relatively easy. You don't need any elaborate matting as long as you're careful in isolating your character to a certain part of the frame. The difficulty from a directorial point of view is you don't have a master shot to gauge performance. The positive side is you can do what used to be very expensive on film, with a Canon XL1, and a cut-and-paste composite on Final Cut Pro."
RESFEST filmmakers at the DGA luncheon at Osso Buco, in Manhattan, echoed Walkow's excitement for how inclusive the new medium's trajectory appears to be. Duncan Creamer and Sara Scott-Harper co-directed the music video Italian Waffles by the band Mujaji. Creamer called RESFEST a "perfect avenue" for DV artists. "With RESFEST the video can gain respect and an audience at a time when even Oscar-nominated short films cannot find a screening venue," Creamer said.
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TIPS - Duane Clark: A good friend told me once: "Keep your enemies close to you." Invariably, in a collaborative process, there will be conflict, and sometimes it may be acrimonious. While it may be tempting to mouth off in such a conflict, it benefits you to be diplomatic in a way that you can keep tabs on their movements and machinations, to massage things in your direction if you need to. Butting heads generally isn't going to profit you. |
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Graphic designer Scott-Harper described indie filmmaking as being "on the cusp between traditional film and digital experimentation. The DV medium is so technologically superior to what it was in the recent past. You can't even tell that things are done digitally."
A blurring of tools and formats, but not creative solidarity, was at the heart of Michael Apted's talk with the filmmakers at the L.A. luncheon. "My contemporaries and I in England all came out of television and commercials, which was our training ground as young directors," Apted said. "Today, those training grounds have all but disappeared. Independents are forced to work in new formats, with their own resources — these are the training grounds of today. The filmmakers in this room are the future of our industry, and the DGA wants to be your resource."
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