|
www.planetnotion.com |
| Straight 8 |
 |
| 15/09/2007 |
|
 I had already heard of straight8 as I plodded hot and tired between the bra-cup pavillions spread along the International Village, a carpeted camp-site for industry posturing, at Cannes 2007. I headed for the Kodak tent, where there was a party quite unlike anything I’d seen in that peculiar town... quite the cure for this intoxicating mundanity, don’t you think?
Straight8’s screening hosted no Linen-suited mafiosi spraying Gray Goose and Bollinger at cheeping chicks gasping for free intoxication, no sauve young producers exhibiting Blaine-inspired tricks (“you’ll remember me when your pockets are so full of business cards your hands freeze off in the arctic chill, baby”), no tuxedoed impressarios swaggering the jive they know is necessary for the next blag. That’s it: the real difference between Straight8 and the rest of Cannes was the lack of blag.
—
Instead, here was euphoria: none of the audience, including the film-makers themselves, had seen any of the films screened. So when something went spectacularly well, there were whoops, hats flung to rafters, riotous laughter, much spilling of wine- but most of all a potent and palpable passion for film, the unrepeatable instant of light first hitting an eight millimetre rectangle.
—
And Ed Sayers is a human distillation of that passion. He started Straight8 in 1999 as a ‘public experiment’- a means to explore as directly as possible the process of film-making. Straight8 stripped away the traditional backand- forth time-machine of the film-set, with all the editing in-camera , and the results of the shoot remaining secret to all until the screening. People liked the idea, so they ‘took out these old cranky cameras from friends’ lofts, dusted them off, got shooting and the films were amazing’.
—
There’s a polyester friction between creativity and obstruction- if there are no bars over the window of your cell, you’ll invent some, secure in the knowledge there’s nothing as scary as a free reign. But there’s always a workaround- so that obstruction is never more than another invention. Strict limitations force people to rely on ingenuity and originality, and that is liberation in the unwavering rules of Straight8- ‘it might be a stressful shoot , but when you finish shooting that’s it- you don’t ever have to try to polish it, or airbrush it , you don’t have to fiddle with this and that’.
This presents an entirely new set of problems to the film-maker. There’s no going back- ‘if you happen to bump the trigger as you’re crossing the road, and get a shot of your feet , then that’s in your film. You could take the next shot, or work it in, or if it’s short enough maybe people won’t notice. Sometimes it comes out cool, sometimes it doesn’t.’
—
So you have to rely on your luck, on ‘happy accidents’, coincidences you wouldn’t notice... But you can improve your luck- every year people are more inventive, more ambitious with the medium. At Cannes 2007 we were treated to the first Straight8 underwater shooting (Josh Sanders), fractal vertigoinducing stop-motion from scientist/director Colin Dewar, and Nick Scott’s split-screen Timecode homage examining the two halves of a relationship..The bar is raised year on year.
—
Since stipulating that all music must be original and copyright-cleared, Ed saw the originality in sound increase exponentially- ‘Because all the editing has to be done in camera, and you can’t see the film as you’re making the soundtrack, its quite an interesting process for a musician who’s brought into it- they’re asked to write something for a film they haven’t seen.’
—
Shooting his own Straight8 for the first time in 6 years- ‘I needed to feel the fear again myself, having encouraged all these other people to do so, and it doesn’t get any easier’, Ed enlisted the help of musician Mary Mary (of Apollo440). He found himself ‘writing these descriptions of a film I hadn’t filmed yet, describing shots that hadn’t been shot yet- about how the mountains would look stopframe from a bicycle’. On seeing the film with the soundtrack for the first time, in front of 250 people, ‘some things came out better than [he] imagined or could have planned- little incidences in the timing of the music track’
—
This year people sent 131 Straight8s, with 12 winners selected. And it is this positivity which drives the competition (and Ed himself) onward- ‘the reason I do it, and that I continue to have the energy to do it, is that the parameters and the strangeness of the process of Straight8 somehow drive a certain kind of film maker to just make a film... just having the balls to go for it- make a film in what can be a very punishing way- you’ve got to have a plan, but you’ve got to be able to change it if things go astray.’ There it is. Balls, plans, changing plans. And no blag. Or the purest form of blag. Choose your own obstruction.
MAKING A STRAIGHT8 COULDN’T BE SIMPLER. IT COULD PROBABLY BE EASIER, BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT I SAID. THESE ARE THE RULES:
· YOU SHOOT ONE CAN OF SUPER8MM FILM- CLOCKING IN AT AROUND 3MINUTES 20 SECONDS.
· ALL EDITING MUST TAKE PLACE IN-CAMERA: SHOT AFTER SHOT. YOU DON’T EVEN GET TO SEE THE FOOTAGE UNTIL IT’S BEEN SELECTED FOR SCREENING.
· ALL MUSIC AND SOUND TRACKS MUST BE ORIGINAL AND COPYRIGHT CLEARED- SUPPLIED ON A CD WHICH IS STARTED BY THE PROJECTIONIST ON THE FIRST FRAME OF THE FILM.
|