I finally uploaded Simplicity, an experimental 16mm film I produced earlier this year. Unicyclists Eyal Aharoni and Danny Jolles helped me make the film, which was selected for UCSB’s annual Reel Loud Film Festival this past May. Also, Simplicity ran in the video competition at Unicon XIV in Copenhagen.
A bunch of my friends composed the music, and performed it live at the Reel Loud Film Festival. This show is quite a unique film festival since every movie has an accompanying live music act, to the side of the stage. The audio in this quicktime file is from a recording on-stage.
Wow, you really did make it look like 16mm is worse than super-8! Were all those effects done in-camera? Any digital post-processing? The end effect makes the film look old and surreal, like a stupid-bike-crash-induced hallucination.
– Danny Jolles. He filmed the parts with me riding, and is an aspiring unicyclist.
– Good question… First I digitized the film when I got it back from the lab, using a really cheap telecine unit we have in the UCSB film studies hall. Then I edited a rough cut together using Adobe Premiere. Because it was so expensive to shoot, I didn’t really have a lot of extra footage. The digital editing was extremely useful for figuring out the MTB bail scene… I had a few shots to work with and I had to make it looks as real as possible. Next, I spent a long time in a little editing room cutting and splicing together my print. The result looked pretty good when projected in the 800-seat Campbell Hall (where the film festival was), despite all the issues I had getting a clear frame. After everything, I did one more telecine on the funky equipment I mentioned previously. Properly done, one would use the service of a company like FotoKem, and have a great looking digital version. The only post-processing I did was to tilt the entire frame so it wasn’t crooked.
– Sorry, no. …maybe download the quicktime overnight?
So you only used telecine for a rough cut, but did the final editing old school? Very impressive! I assume the overcranked slow-mos were done in-camera too. What you’ve done is becoming a lost art and looks great because it’s so different and has a genuine vintage feel. Make more please!
