In 2004, my friend and film collaborator Jeff Plansker was invited to make a short film using Sony's new HD Cine Alta video camera, in recognition of his work as a director of commercials. A strange honor, in that Sony provides the camera and a technician, but the director/production co. must pay for the production; a clever way to promote the use of HD video with users and I guess a good opportunity to work on an open project for the director. For several years, Sony organized a series of short films made this way as their "Dreams" project, screening the results in LA, NY and Cannes. I believe 2005 was the last year of Dreams.
Jeff told me in the fall of 04 that he was trying to work with a writer-collaborator on a short story for the project, and perhaps I would be called on to make music for it, but come 2005 they hadn't come up with a clear story, and the project was due by the end of February. I was called in as clean-up crew, invited by Jeff to develop the alternate project idea. We consumed a few bottles of RGW (really good wine) and put some ideas on paper. We wrote the piece in 2 days, pre-produced for 2 days, shot for 2 days, and edited the film in 2 days. It was instant filmmaking, a pretty exciting way to work.
The theme of that year's Dreams project was "Flight". And we retained one idea from the initial story Jeff had been working on: that of filming in a actual airplane interior, which exists as a set in West Hollywood i think. We removed all language from our film vocabulary and decided to make a music piece. Of course we started kicking around ideas inspired by Fluxus events but then wound up narrowing in towards something closer to Stockhausen. Jeff had heard of a choir that was willing to work on film projects and I came up with an editing scheme that could collage the actual singing of the chorus into an experimental audio piece.
The Truncated Turbo-Pascal Editing System is a new method for randomizing the edit process. About 10 years ago I had some ideas about creating random templates for video-film editing after being first introduced to the Avid system. I believed that company might have been interested in developing a series of plots or patterns that could be applied to any digitized film footage to come up with interesting sequences which human intervention would pass by or just miss in the almost infinite combinations of possible edits. I met with an editor in LA (Bobby Briggs, if i remember correctly) who heard about my idea and was interested, but nothing ever came back to me about my proposal (to create templates for a digital editing system). I may have written once to Avid also, with no response. Anyway, this new project allowed me to make a breakthrough with the same idea. I quickly developed a new way to apply random numbers to a film bin with the help of editor Noah Herzog, whose nimble mind quickly understood what I was trying to do and we applied the System to this project.
So, the shoot days went well; it was a nice, relaxed project. Unfortunately, the one area I didn't think through or get enough info in advance on was the fact that this fancy HD camera has 8 or 9 tracks of audio built into the tape. So, we had stupidly hired the usual DAT recorder boom and tape op guys ("sound speed"), who did get us a decent stereo recording of everything we shot, however: 2 stereo mics could have tapped directly into the video recorder and made the audio compositing (finishing, putting together) so much easier. We also could have used a multi-mic surround recording approach but didn't think of it. really, Sony dropped the balls by not educating us about the sound properties of their system; and we were making a SOUND piece! I think the mic built into the camera captured a mono audio track.
The film we made: THE LION STILL HAS WINGS, consists of 3 sections, each of which directly derives from the experience of airplane flight. In the edit room, we applied the TTPES (Truncated Turbo-Pascal editing System) to the main segment, the 2nd section, of the film, in which the choir sings inside an airplane. I brought Jeff's brother's old casio into the plane set and played the octave of notes beginning with a low e-flat and going up from there. With each note, the choir would collectively repeat the note after hearing it until we had recorded 2 octaves I believe. Some variations and chords were built with the help of the choir director. The Turbo-Pascal system neatly divided the choir shoot into 91 shots. We used a random number generator to determine the sequence in which these shots were placed and their length in frames (up to 91 frames). The result had some tremendous collisions and, with some massaging of the material by Mr. Herzog, became a beautiful audio piece. Matt Dunlop did an amazing job of converting the stereo tracks from DAT to the camera-mic edit version we first created. A lot of very good people helped make this film, which I consider an instant film. It wasn't free, in fact it was quite costly to produce. But I think it's a nice indicator of what is possible.
Nods to Carl Swanberg for the gorgeous reel-to-reel machines.
Please view THE LION STILL HAS WINGS at www.lionstillhaswings.com
