Calgary Underground Film Fest/Technical/
I’m Technical Director for CUFF, just so you know. I managed to pull off an almost exclusively HD festival this year, with the exception of a few features presented on Digi-Beta, a lone DVD from a low-budget project from a distant land, and the 48 Hour Film Making Challenge which was SD and which I had no part in (HD next year for certain.) All of our trailers, festival brand stuff, and all of the short films were on HD, and everything looked amazing once I had really tweaked and optimized the Plaza‘s Christie projector and ancient but rad stereo matrix sound system, (the director of the cult horror film “The Woman” told me that my presentation of his film was the best it had had.)
The highlight of the festival for me was a film called BELLFLOWER. This was by far the most underground production in the festival, and by far the most fun to project. The film is entirely handmade, to the extent that they even built their own camera to shoot on, and the story ties perfectly to the process of making it. The shooting doesn’t aspire to anything other than the film’s true character, where I find that many small budget films either look like the DOP is building his reel, hoping one day to work on a real movie, or that the film crew can’t escape their TV commercial training. By contrast, I literally welled up at seeing shots where their camera’s ground glass had stopped spinning, perfect static specs of dirt and beautiful smudges framing perfectly affected story. The grit testifies to their actual possessed ingenuity, and to their personal investment in the work. There are tweaky things going on with the colour that come across as an acknowledgment of the “film”s digital production format without going anywhere cheap; that saturated yellow thing is so perfect. Sound wise, there are such awesome details, like that the mic was on a stand in the house scenes – given away by the LF rumble when the characters walked, or like how they didn’t try to hide the tiny bit of ADR they use – feels like a dubbed Kung-Fu film. BELLFLOWER doesn’t seem poorly crafted, by subtly exposing/not filtering the process it made me feel like I helped make it. Mostly though, the sound mix was so beautifully restrained, totally sticking to the -18dB bounce that when loud things happen they seem unbelievably loud. The first time they test out the car was a serious event. And, from the projectionist’s perspective, it was awesome to see the odd digital cigarette burn stuck in the corner, it was awesome considerate that the HDCAM tape was recorded to 29.97 fps (my favourite frame rate) and came with a Blu-ray backup – I was so tempted to not know what could’ve happened to it, and that the sound had real dynamic range. Bellflower feels like my life, hands on and dirty, emotionally turbulent, frustrating and luminescent. Coatwolf!!
CUFF’s presenting the 25th anniversary of RAD in August. My PL-20 I’d been riding since 1986 was stolen last year, so I’ll be dredging up another bike for that for sure.
