6.14.2010

SuperFly 2010

Well as quickly as it arrived it was over just as fast, that's right SuperFly 2010 seems to exist as a blurred memory of sorts. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, the flight cancellations and late arrival into Seattle, the early morning departure to the Lummi Nation, the missed orientation and introductions to some new faces due to my late arrival, the surreal rush through the end of the opening day? Apparently, I'll never know.

So, it was a wonderful success from my vantage point anyway. All the wonderfully screened pieces in the FutureWave section of the Seattle International Film Festival went over well and unfortunately the remainder of the shorts I sat through in this section of SIFF, well, had limited if any production quality. The one piece that really stood out for me was, "Omer," a documentary character study--my favorite and hopefully the audience choice award recipient. I didn't stick around for any more shorts in this program due to the poor production quality, it was self-induced torture at that point and I decided to exit.

Back to SuperFly 2010, as it is a hurried process it goes without saying that at some point it reaches a fevered pitch. This year I seemed to be the senior mentor of the group and decided early on to take a hands off approach to let two previous youth participants, now mentors, take over and run the production by giving the youth the run down and direction of production. I'm not saying that was a mistake, but in hindsight, I shouldn't have been as hands-off. I worked on some logistical aspects during our production meeting, since we lost our acting mentor somewhere in the ether. I approached another acting mentor to come speak with our youth in order to provide those that decided to act with some helpful tips and wisdom. When I returned, the pre-production meeting seemed to have gone down some unnecessary tangential path. Not to point any fingers or place blame, one of the mentors had a copy of Robert Rodriguez's fifteen year old book, Rebel Without a Crew, and was guiding the youth through it for no true purpose other than sheer excitement. It's a book that addresses making a film for around $7000 and in our particular instance we had no parallel to his situation. We were making a short, 4-5 minute narrative and we had all the technology needed without the worry of cost. I tried to bring the pre-production meeting back on point by directing the youth to decide what role, if any, they were going to play in the short production and having the other mentors decide a shot list and schedule. They seemed to do this with ease and eventually dealing with other logistics we called it a night, production was to start at 9am, or shortly thereafter once we had our equipment.

The day of production went fairly well. We met once again before getting our equipment to go over logistics, but somewhere in the thick of things the shot list seemed to be somewhat incomplete . . . this wasn't discovered until post-production when all footage had been captured. Editing was where the short was going to be won or lost. Now, I checked with our Lummi associate for a place away from traffic for us to set up our temporary editing suite. After having done this a bit of mutiny seemed to be going on in the mentor ranks and a mentor wanted to move our location in a room adjacent to another group's editing suite that had no door. Editing can be a very challenging process and I saw setting up next to another group as a distraction that would cost us in the long run, so senior mentor veto had to be put into play. We kept our current suite location and the process began. My experience as a SuperFly mentor has been centered around the youth and their desired positions within the production. At editing, we had a smattering of youth and all our mentors crammed in the suite location, which wasn't large, and didn't need to be. Since the capturing of footage was going to occur in real time I decided to let the youth editor, at this point, capture and I went for a walk through the facility that was our temporary home. I headed to the sound area to talk with the mentors there about what they would be able to offer us, at that point I was told once we had a rough cut they would sit down with us and discuss original music and sound fxs. I checked back with the group on occasion and when the editing process began I was pleasantly surprised to see our youth editor working away with minimal assistance from our other mentors, aside from the occasional input. As not seeing a need to remain I decided to visit other groups and ask how their productions went throughout the day and how their post-production was going. I also went into the room that the mentors were calling their home and sleeping, well the previous night anyway and nodding off here and there catching a few winks if one were so inclined. I met and spoke with an amazing woman and guest for a bit of time discussing art and artists mutually known. I eventually nodded off for about twenty minutes before I decided to get up and check on our group's editing progress. To my dismay and surprise there was really no true rough cut being worked on, it appeared that only three scenes had been placed within the time-line and these scenes were being edited at a snail's pace. The younger mentors asked if I wanted to see the progress, which was grossly apparent not to be true progress, but none-the-less I sat down and watched and eventually had to assume senior editor duties since our deadline for a rough cut was painfully close and the rough cut was far from near. Now disappointed as I was at the lack of forward progress, I had to step in and man the helm to assure a successfully completed rough, rough cut. About an hour to an hour and a half passed before the SuperFly heads stopped by to check on our progress and see a rough cut, and they did comment on how much we had been able to accomplish in that time frame. I believe, were it not for me getting back to the group and focusing the editing to create a viable rough cut for viewing, all might have been lost and we may have never reached our destined and appointed deadline.

I'm not placing blame on anyone but myself for the failure of our group to have been able to produce at 100%. In reality, these were youth and mentors on the edge of youth without time management skills or the true knowledge of what is needed to accomplish goals that have been placed before them. As hindsight is 20/20, I would have completely been involved in every aspect instead of taking a back seat and allowing the younger more novice mentors attempt to lead where they were incapable. I look back at the pre-production meetings, the production and post-production and realized exactly where things went wrong. I don't really recall the pre-production meetings having any steam or devoted involvement from our youth. Our youth seemed unmotivated, ill-equipped, unenthusiastic from years previous, which is always detrimental when needing individuals to assume certain roles with a production. The production itself seemed flawed at the start, once we were at our first location order seemed lost to boredom and indifference for the production. Although, once the initial scene was finally shot (virtually taking the longest to complete), the youth seemed to come to life and have more interest in what was taking place. Moving forward into the production it seemed that our youth lost interest, stepped out of their determined or chosen roles, and just hung on. Were it not for our wonderful lead actor, this production would have been a dismal failure. The lack of communication between the younger mentors and our youth is probably the one aspect most responsible for my criticism and my role as "hands-off" is very much to blame, although at the time I thought things were moving forward and getting accomplished. Once in that editing suite it was painfully apparent that shots were missing, neglected to have been either thought about or gotten. I don't think there was one reaction shot in the entire production, every shot focused on the character speaking or their action. It pains me to say that I think our group's final piece, although a good production, that's all it was, it could have been great and I failed in making that happen. Well, lesson learned and I truly apologize to the youth and younger mentors for having failed you in producing in the capacity we as a group could have produced.