This Sunday, the short version of the documentary titled "Brooklyn Racine" will be shown at SOB's in Manhattan, and the directors and musicians of the band DJARARA will host a workshop on Haitian music and culture. It will be part of a special family culture event also featuring Haitian music, poetry, and dance.

We're also re-launching our educational events - more info at http://www.othersideofthewater.org/news.asp

The Other Side of the Water will screen as a part of the Urbanworld Film Festival - presented by BET and HBO - on Friday, September 12th, at 10pm at the Tribeca Film Center
375 Greenwich Street between N. Moore and Franklin St
New York, NY

check back for more details...

Things I love about post-production: its where the story comes to life, where a bunch of fragmented clips, sounds, images can magically congeal into a reflection of our deepest experiences as humans. It's also a great mixture of art and organization: when I have a creative mind I can dive into story-issues, think about how a character is developing, think about how to create mood, how to re-imagine transitions; when I'm feeling brain-dead, there's always endless amounts of organizational tasks I can slog through and still feel somewhat productive.

Things I don't love about post-production: this film took over two years to edit.

Here's how the post-production basically worked:

* In the end there was roughly 300 hours of footage we shot [most of the first 100 hours was figuring out the visual style, and following angles that were later dropped. Perhaps 5 minutes from the first 100 hours ended up in the final cut.]
* There was roughly 50 hours of archival footage we got from individuals, organizations, or from screener tapes we purchased from archival houses.
* All of the 350 hours of footage was digitized first at low-resolution (Final Cut Pro's "DV Offline Resolution" – which comes out to roughly 4 gigs per hour). I like having all the footage at my fingertips, and hate going back to the tapes to find out if there was anything else good from that scene….
* When we got to later-stage rough-cuts, we would use FCP's Media Manager tool to uprez the clips used to full DV resolution. (If I were starting over today, with hard drives being so much cheaper, I'd digitize everything at full resolution. I'd also shoot less, but that's another story.)
* All of the interviews were transcribed (and translated if necessary) into Word documents.
* We created a File Maker Pro database for all the footage. In the end, it consisted of roughly 800 files. All the interviews were broken up and dropped in, all the b-roll and vérité tapes were summarized. Then each card was given descriptors for character, location, and "theme". The database took about three months to construct, but it was completely worth it. When it was finished, I could find any fragment of footage within seconds: In the middle of editing, I could instantly search for, say… the moment when Yves says that line about growing up in Catholic schools in Haiti… or search for every time someone mentions the band Foula, or everyone who discusses the Haitian Revolution. [here's a screen-grab of the database]


[Filemaker Pro Database]

* If I were to do it over again, I think I'd skip all the "theme" boxes at the bottom. It was helpful, but it took a huge amount of time to categorize each point made by every interviewee, and I could find most of the same points by key-word searches. I doubt it helped me save as much time as it took to create.
* The edit itself looked something like this:
o A few months spent chopping down every tape or scene into a rough assembly
o Picking the 20-or-so scenes that worked the best
o Stringing these into a loose narrative
o Showing this as a rough-cut, and asking audience members what they saw, what moments stood-out to them, what themes came through.
o From that feedback, continued shooting, editing, and holding rough-cut screenings for the next year to solidify the story-arc.

That's the organization. In terms of the "art"… more on that in another post.

These days, when I'm teaching an "intro to documentary production" class, I tell students that before embarking on a feature-length doc, they should have a number of "ingredients" firmly in place:
1. a topic in need of exploration
2. an "emotional core" to that topic
3. compelling characters
4. a story-arc that will carry you through an hour+ of viewing
5. a stylistic approach that brings the story to life visually, and
6. some realistic hope of funding.

In a scrapyard in Crown Heights almost five years ago, in the moment I committed myself to making this film, I had exactly one of these in place: a topic. Rara in New York.

I knew enough to know it wasn't quite enough, but sometimes you do what you feel you need to do.

Fortunately for me, pieces of the second ingredient appeared within minutes: characters. First Pe Yves approached us and started talking. Immediately I was swept into his charisma, his passion for rara music (or "the movement" as he put it), the effortless poetry of his speech, and his genuine sweetness as a human being. I felt: this is a guy I could follow for a long time and not get bored. The second character - Max – also caught our eye. He arrived looking like he'd come from a corporate job, speaking flawed Kréyol and unaccented English. He seemed like a perfect "outsider/insider" who could help an audience member enter this complex and unfamiliar land.


[Yves the Visionary]

[Max (left) who works in corporate America. Joujou (right) who's main job is playing drums for basement vodou ceremonies.]



In terms of the other ingredients? A visual style we basically made up along the way. A story arc got worked out in the edit room 3 years later [a future post on that]. The "emotional core" really only emerged as we were listening to test-audiences at early rough-cut screenings, and started focusing some of the character development around what we were hearing. And funding? Well, a few grants, a few fundraising parties, shameless begging to friends, relatives and people with access to equipment. If you have a laptop and 5 years to kill, what else do you need?

[See the full blog at othersideofthewater.blogspot.com.]

Cinematography has always been my favorite part of the film making process. And I've always loved documentaries that make a bold stylistic choices in their cinematography: films like The War Photographer, To Be and To Have, Fast Cheap and Out of Control…. These documentaries somehow are able to distill their essence, their 'way of seeing,' into concrete and unconventional cinemagraphic choices. Even with the sound turned off, a viewer of these films can be transported into a very specific and powerful mind-frame.

It's also a very fine line. I've seen overly-bold choices that don't quite work, and end up looking gimmicky and distracting. And when I think of my other favorite documentaries – Paris is Burning, Sound and Fury, Our Brand is Crisis – these don't do anything bold or unconventional. They simply make the right choices from the conventional 'bag of tricks,' and execute them very well.

For this doc, the approach was to simply follow our instincts, try out a ton of things, and watch carefully for what felt right. I hoped for a really bold breakthrough, but didn't want to end up in gimmick-land.

APPROACHES THAT FAILED:
One initial "bold" idea was to commit to the idea of the "procession" – to try to capture the flowing vitality of the moving rara in as much of the footage as possible. This would mean: all of the interviews would use a pulled-zoom (so the picture is always zooming in or out super-slowly); all of the b-roll and city-scapes would be shot in a dolly or glide-cam.

In the end, not such a great idea. We still hadn't quite found our story, and knew it would take a ton of interviewing to discover the right material. So the idea of one of us committing to doign nothing but pulling zoom through 150 hours of interviews didn't sound too productive. Also, the glide-cam b-roll (especially using a wide-angle adapter) just ended up looking like a low-budget rap-video.

Scrap that.

Another idea was time-lapse. This is far from revolutionary, but I wanted to see how time-lapses could be used not just as "the city as a machine" or "watch the patterns as a process unfolds." Rather, I wanted to explore time-lapse for mood. A lot of the documentary is about an invisible side of the city, just below the surface. I hoped that I could find a lot of time-lapses that could take a viewer "below the surface" or take them from the familiar city to the unfamiliar.

In the end, these image sequences were hard to find and harder to capture. Here's a few of the ones I liked best: showing the transformation of Prospect Park after dark, the changing of "cultural ownership" of a public environment, the creation of a ritual space….

Most of these ended up on the cutting-room floor (or the banished regions of my hard drive). But that's what blogs are for…
[See link at othersideofthewater.blogspot.com]


SUBTLE THINGS THAT STAYED IN THE FILM:
For whatever reason, two things I started seeing in the footage and liking were foreground silhouettes, and shots of characters descending into basements. The silhouettes just "felt right," and for whatever reason felt in-line with the mood I wanted to create. And the basement shots came the closest to conveying the "hidden world" theme. Much of the Brooklyn Haitian roots community exists literally and figuratively "underground." So I started watching for and capturing all of the moments of characters walking down stairs to hidden vodou temples, to illegal basement apartments, to under-ground rehearsal spaces… Here's a few examples of each:

Foreground silhouettes

statue of liberty and train



[B-roll of train and Statue of Liberty; Kone rehearsal; street scene in garage]



Descending into basements:




[Drummers entering a basement vodou ceremony; Dadou's construction job in the bowels of a Manhattan skyscraper]

These are very subtle, and most likely an audience member wouldn't notice them as visual themes at all. But in the end that's what the film seemed to need.

Our Basic Specs:
The vast majority of this doc was shot on the Panasonic DVX100 MiniDV camera in 24P mode, 1/24th shutter (which added even more stutter, but gave another stop of light). For a few days we rented a shoulder mounted SDX900 with which we shot much of the city-scapes.

The biggest shooting challenge involved shooting the nighttime raras. The DVX has pretty bad low-light sensitivity, and its even worse in 24p mode. (In fact, the main reason we rented the huge SDX was for low-light shooting. We rented it on J'Ouverty night (the biggest procession of the year) in 2005. Of course, that was the year the police shut down the rara almost immediately, so it was almost a complete waste. So instead we stayed up all night and started shooting cityscapes at sunrise. We never had the budget to do this again.)

What we ended up doing for the other raras was to buy a battery-belt-powered portable light, rig together a boot-leg soft-box for it, and have one of us hold the light off-axis while the other was shooting (this prevents the straight-ahead flat lighting you get if you mount the light on the camera: the "live-at-5" look). Here's a few pics of our set-up in action. [The "soft box" is made from black-wrap, gaffer's tape, a bit of diffusion gel, and binder-clips... which for me are the basic legos of lighting]

[See link at othersideofthewater.blogspot.com]

Another thing about raras: not only are they dark, away from electricity, and full of jostling crowds, but they MOVE. Rara, at their core, are processions. From the beginning we explored ways to try to capture that motion, and the tool won out was the Glidecam2000. They were frustrating to use: it usually took almost a half-hour to tweak the counter-weights and screws to get it balanced. If I got it slightly wrong, the images would have a swinging quality that would make you sea-sick to watch. But when it was just right, it would create some beautifully stable images, even when I was running full speed. Here's some raw footage examples. (At the end you'll see Yves try to protect me from getting clobbered by the over-enthusiastic crowd.)

[See the full blog at othersideofthewater.blogspot.com]

Most directors' first documentary, like unplanned pregnancies, results from a mixture of extreme excitement, naiveté, a possibly too many drinks.

My involvement in this film starts way back in 2003 when I was talking with a distant relative name Verna Gillis at a family gathering in a Greek restaurant on the upper west side. Verna's actually a legendary ethnomusicologist who's traveled the world documenting folk music for Smithsonian Folkways. She later was a manager for world music artists (Selif Keita and Yosou N'Dour among others), but by '03 she had retired. I had recently been transitioning from teaching high school kids to documentary work, and was asking her if she knew interesting story ideas. She lit up, saying she'd just come out of retirement to produce an album with a young Haitian musician with a fascinating back-story, and ask me to document the making of this album. Emboldened by my third glass of syrupy Greek wine, I though to myself "this could be a feature!"

In short, I dove in and started doing a ton of research. I had been interested in Haitian politics and a friend had turned me on to some Racine music in school, and the more I researched the more hooked I was getting. Soon into the process I connected with Magali – who had just moved back to Brooklyn from Haiti, and was a friend of the same musician, and we decided to work together on the project. To make a long story short, just as we were both really getting into the idea of documenting this album, the whole album project fell apart and got scrapped, and the musician moved back to Paris. Ouch.

By then I was on a roll, and fixated on the topic, and Magi and I spent the next night brainstorming about other angles to take. One thing always stuck in my head: Verna once mentioned that of all the musics she'd ever recorded across the globe, the most amazing thing she'd ever heard was a this walking music in the mountains of Haiti called Rara. I'd recently read a book on rara by the Wesleyan professor Liza McAlister that included a chapter on a small movement of rara in New York in the early 1990's. I asked Magi if she'd ever heard of rara in New York and she replied "Yeah! There's only one left – they're my boys DJA-Rara. They're rehearsing tonight. Lets go!"


[Scrapyard on Pacific Ave where we met the DJARARA]


A few hours later we were on a grimy stretch of Pacific Ave in Crown Heights, passing auto-body shops and junkyards. We ducked into the last junkyard on the block to find a circle of young guys unpacking hand-strung drums and these huge tin horns.

Its hard to describe the "Ah-Ha!" moment that hit me then. It had something to do with the unearthly sounds that came out of the horns, or the complete juxtaposition of junkyard and the rhythms of this 10-piece symphonic band. Or the fact that these young dudes, who were dressed like any other thugged-out hip-hop kid in NYC, were clearly so identified with this ancient folk music. Whatever it was, magi and I may have had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but we haven't looked back since.



[See full blog at othersideofthewater.blogspot.com ]

The Other Side of the Water is kicking off the Labor Day / West Indian Day Parade weekend with a sneak preview at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinématek. There will be three screenings on Thursday August 28th. Stay tuned for details on tickets, the after-party, and events throughout the weekend.

Last weekend a crew from The Backyard Show flew up from Miami to New York and taped two shows on Haitian roots culture in Brooklyn. The first show focused on DJA-Rara and our documentary, the second on other Haitian roots musicians. The Backyard Show is an awesome new arts and culture talk show that's making a lot of noise in Miami [see the June 10th article in Miami Herald. Check the show at
http://www.thebackyardshow.net].
It was a hectic but fun taping – with a live audience and all! Five Myles art gallery provided the space, HaitiXchange came by, as well as come great artists and Brooklyn culture heads. Check out pics on
www.othersideofthewater.org/photos_new.asp?series=126], and the show should be up on the Backyard website in a few weeks…

A few weeks back we did two fantastic events at Columbia University. On Sunday, February 25th the band DJA-Rara led a rara procession to open a finale event for Black History Month. Two days later the Haitian Student Alliance had the filmmakers back for a rough-cut of the documentary and a Q&A.

The documentary struck some interesting chords with the largely American-born or American-raised Haitian student audience, and we got some really great feedback at the end. Thanks again to the Columbia HaSA for hosting us.

Here's a link to photos from the Feb. 25th event:
http://www.imagestation.com/