Film-makers and the madness
Today I went to another studio, one called EyePost on King STreet East in Toronto, along with the students of the Film classes I am attending.
We went to a studio called Technicolor, 2 weeks ago.
Once a guest lecturer came to college and spoke to us about film-making. He appeared casual and not like a cabbage professor. Cabbage-Prof, I just made up the term. You get the idea right ?
In going to these studios and meeting all these people, the noticeable thing is that they are all so crazy and passionate, totally in love with film tapes and editing boxes. They can spend whole weekends sitting and tweaking video for post production in a dark room with two computers, editing equipment, a large screen in front while surviving on beer and cold pizza.
Each of these people, including our instructor Gordon Burkell, was more than eager to help as they came up as a novices, thirtsy for solutions to problems, themselves.
The film-veteran, speaking to us, wanted to tell us how to convert one format to another as he had just discovered a way to save time and money! Money was always short he said.
The way many films get made, he continued, is with a few hundred bucks on the table. The guys shoot a video and make the first edited draft. Then they show it somewhere and win a distributor who puts in a some thousands. Finally, they may get a budget of $50 million just by hoping and climbing up. Hope. Thats all.
All these people are crazy about story-telling through film - a documentary or fiction. Broken footage on climbing Mt everest from the 1980s to after 2000. Surrealistic pieces.
In my Introduction to video production, we were shown a short videos about lighting up the Eiffel tower. The maker of the video, Helga is our teacher. She conducted an interview with a workman who was up on the tower fixing lights. He was actually a mountaineer as expert climbers were needed for the tricky job. They carried heavy lights and worked while the tower was still open tourists. It would be certain death if the smallest of their tools dropped on anyone’s head from that height.
Helga conducted a mobile phone interview with the workman. She could not hear his answers as he spoke into a mini-microphone for the camera. The cameraman was strapped up on the tower with the workman - both of them hanging high over Paris. And since Helga was using a Canadian number, the call went to Canada first and was then redirected back to Paris. This way she communicated with a guy hanging high up right over her head. This was when she was not walking along the girders of the Eiffel tower for the shooting!