Soundtrack Reviews + Updates
Just posted is a review of Jon Ekstrand’s Child 44 (2015) soundtrack music and an early review of Michael Brook’s score for the IMAX 3D film Jerusalem (2013), both from Lakeshore Records.
Coming later this evening is a lengthy review of Twilight Time’s To Sir, With Love (1967) Blu-ray, but a short update on a few affairs.
I’ve been finishing up a short documentary over the past two months, and as a May 1st deadline looms, posts have been less frequent, since missing another festival deadline isn’t possible. Well, it is, but it’s not going to happen, as this particular project’s been in various states of completion for a while now.
The original concept of BSV 1172 was to shoot the innards and daily routine of a video store with a camera that, like the bricks & mortar rental shop, reflects what most critics and the general public feel is long gone and obsolete.
A Monterey Herald piece on Carmel Valley Video has store owners Peg & Pete Jones describing the uniqueness of their establishment to curious passersby, tourists, and a few that take photos of what more than likely no longer exists in their home towns or cities.
As I’ve said in prior posts, Toronto is unusual in having several video shops whereas most major cities of similar scale have far less, based on tallies at sites like International Independent Video Store Day. Toronto isn’t immune to the demise of the video store – in the last few months we lost Upstairs Video, The Film Buff East, Movie Art Décor, and Barrie lost the massive Bandito Video – but there are stores that continue to enjoy daily business from supportive locals.
Aspects of the industry have been profiled in an assortment of documentaries, and (hopefully) coming to home video this year are James Westby’s At the Video Store (2015) and Mike Malloy’s epic multi-part chronicle of the home video industry, Plastic Movies Rewound: The Story of the ‘80s Home Video Boom (2014).
I started my short in the fall of 2012, did reshoots and cut a teaser trailer in 2013, and between sporadic bouts of editing in 2013 and 2014, largely let it be because there were some technical aspects that had to be figured out, most involving layering and bouncing footage between analogue & digital mediums to get a specific look. There was also outright laziness, and the need to really think through how certain sequences had to be constructed get a specific look.
I’d probably shoot the film a little differently now, but the goal has been to complete the movie as close to the original concept as possible, and keep its design somewhere in the middle ground in which documentary narrative collides with experimental filmmaking.
There are no interviews, no film clips, no ongoing narration, no talking humans. It’s neither a nostalgia piece nor a chronicle of what was. It is an exploration of the daily nuances within a video store’s operations (in this case, every nook & cranny of Bay Street Video), but expressed with crackhead visuals and sound design.
It’s also a test to see if one can find a methodology to shoot in SD and make the footage workable in a HD environment. (If you’ve seen some of the montages I’ve done for recent podcasts, you’ll know the answer is yes.)
At this stage, the film is pretty much fine cut, and will likely run around 25 mins. Between now and May 1st I’ll post several film & soundtrack reviews, and in May there’ll be interviews that have been idling on the hard drive because of time and space issues.
(I’m not sure what the norm is when it comes to the size of a short film’s digital components, but as it stands, the raw footage, layered effects tracks, project files, and low-res test renderings of sequences within BSV 1172 take up about 550GB. I suspect when the main & end credits are done, and a 5.1 sound mix is completed, it’ll get closer to 1 TB.)
Next week I’ll also post either a still or a short video clip from the film in salute to National Canadian Film Day, where rental & sales shops are coordinating a salute to Canadian films on home video. NCFD is Wednesday April 29th.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Category: EDITOR'S BLOG
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