Island bound

a crew of one

Dear friends,

It’s hot, and some guys I know are building a foghorn for a movie we’re making, and they’re on an island, and it’s cooler there, so when I wake up in the morning I’m going to drop the kids off at their second-to-last day of school and then go to that island for a few hours.  This is a fairly impromptu decision, and hopefully the ferries are running on schedule. I love the odd pageantry of the ferry, the way the whole ship dips when a big truck rumbles on, laden with construction supplies for the islanders. I love the deep sounds, the smell of hot metal, the unbelievable relief of the sea breeze when you get clear of the seaweed plant where they’re making carrageenan for ice cream. 

In this situation, I’m going it alone. Going it alone isn’t usually as fun as filming with a crew, but sometimes it’s necessary. I’ve always tried to keep up with my camerawork, which not only enhances my understanding of what our camerapersons are up to, and up against, but also gives me the freedom to film something whenever I want. I never liked the notion that a film of mine would stall out if I didn’t have money to hire a cameraperson. Keeping a good quality digital cinema camera up and running is no small expense either, but I’ve always found it to be worth it. On top of all the other reasons, and to use an outdated expression, it feels like a craftsman should know his tools. 

I’ve been lucky to work with some talented cinematographers over the years. Sam Cullman shot a lot of King Corn. Taylor Gentry filmed The Greening of Southie, The City Dark, The Melungeons, The Emoji Story and The Search for General Tso, probably others I’m forgetting, it was hot today, can’t think. Emily Topper filmed The Most Unknown, Picture a Scientist, The Emoji Story and even took time off from filming a movie about Taylor Swift to shoot a movie we made about my favorite teacher called Postcards from Vershire. Michael James Murray filmed The Most Unknown and The Long Coast, bits of others too. Ezra Wolfinger filmed The Arc of Oblivion, Shelf Life, Observer, and now this foghorn movie; he and I have some other harebrained ideas in the works too. 

The first person who taught me how to use a movie camera was Taylor Krauss, a classmate from college and easily one of the most talented people I’ve ever met. He filmed on The Most Unknown, The Search for General Tso, and I think on Picture a Scientist too. He speaks all sorts of languages and created an amazing archive of video testimonials from the Rwandan genocide. When he taught me about the videocamera back in 2003, he started with a discussion of ones and zeroes, the elemental bits that comprise the digital world. I loved that. It was very much in the spirit of a craftsman knowing his tools. 

Here’s a picture from the ferry, five years ago, when I was out there in the bay horsing around with Elliot Kirschner and Sharon Shattuck, generally scheming and admiring buoys. I could look at this picture all day.

There’s not a single film I’ve made where I didn’t shoot some or all of the footage. But because I don’t use my camera every day, sometimes I get tripped up. On a shoot last year, because of an illness on our team I had to rise to the occasion and become the 2nd camera on a shoot we were doing off the coast of Spain. It’s already doggone hard to film on small boats, but on one of our shoot days I somehow clicked an errant button in my settings and shut off my ability to monitor what I was filming. In other words, I could only point the camera in the right direction and hope that everything else - focus, exposure, frame rate, shutter speed, shutter angle, ISO, white balance, etc - was set correctly. This is really a very bad way to film something. Looking back on it now, I feel like it would have been reasonable to just chuck the whole $20,000 rig in the sea and tell everyone that the 2nd camera was experiencing light mechanical difficulties, but please let’s continue. 

Bouts of astonishing incompetence aside, I love the task of filming a scene. I have wondered if I get this from my Dad, who taught photography for fifty years, and who spent an enormous amount of time on our cross-country road trips stopping the car and running off into the wilds to capture a shot of this or that. We have never seen most of these photographs, but for Dad the joy of capturing the light was irrepressible. He would climb impossibly tall trees, scale rocks, trespass onto dubious bridges, hop across streams as if the camera was also somehow powering him, imparting an almost superhuman energy that would last for hours. 

When I’m in the thick of filming a scene, I feel this energy too. You forget about the weight of the camera, your hunger, the fatigue from staying up too late backing up yesterday’s footage — the act of seeing takes over. An in-the-zone concentration consumes you. And as absurd as this sounds, one of the best things about it is that you can spend hours without looking at your doggone telephone. When I’m looking at my telephone, I’m not really living. Even a digital cinema camera - screen time to be sure! - can elevate a person above the stupid, dead-eyed glaze of smart phoning. (I guess filming things with your smart phone is somewhere in the middle of this muddle.)

Maybe that’s another reason I hang onto my cameras, which aren’t as nice as the ones our cinematographers use, and which I occasionally want to chuck into the Mediterranean, but which nonetheless grant me a reminder of something elemental about documentary filmmaking: you have to focus your attention. Which means paying attention. You do this for a few hours, framing & moving & adjusting & recording, then suddenly notice that you’re exhausted, you’ve lost track of time, it’s a rush to get back on the ferry, find an uncomfortable bench — and hopefully your phone doesn’t get reception, so you can stare out at the fog and dream.