That One Perfect Take
Posted by Ben Wert on September 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment
My hands started to shake. My friend Paul had just taken a very expensive camera from me. I’m not sure why they were shaking. Was it muscle fatigue? I’d been holding the fairly heavy camera at chest level for what felt like more than an hour. My poor feeble arm muscles weren’t used to being in that position, let alone bearing weight. They might have been shaking from relief. The camera was worth thousands of dollars – the most expensive thing I’ve ever held, and I’d spent the evening cradling it while repeatedly walking backwards over a bridge, the occasional cyclist spiking my blood pressure by speeding by.
I was the cameraman for my friend Paul, who was shooting a music video. It was a simple enough shoot. I was filming Paul walking across a bridge. He was listening to an iPod of the music the video would be accompanying, except the music was playing at double its normal speed. The video would be slowed down, so that it looked like Paul was singing the music at the correct speed, as the world sluggishly moved around him.
It was my first time being a part of Paul’s film making, but he had been working hard at it for a number of years. A graduate of the now defunct Toronto Film School, he has a Youtube page filled with student films and special effects shots. That night, he was filming the music video to unwind. He’d filmed another music video just the night before.
Why does he need projects to unwind? As we walk back to his house, he tells me about how he’s currently editing a piece he filmed for MCC, the ‘Mennonite Central Committee’, documenting the affects of Canadian mining companies in Central America. He enjoyed filming it, but now he’s onto the work of subtitling. He’s using the rudimentary translations he got while filming to create stand in subtitles until he gets a more exact translation. It is grueling work with very little creativity involved. He does these music videos as mini-projects to keep his creative juices flowing.
Having any sort of film-related work is lucky enough, though. Lucrative as they are, the commissions can be few and very far between. In the future, he hopes to not have to rely on commissioned works. Paul has completed a number of his own films, most recently ‘Tribe’, a 15-minute documentary he filmed in Kenya. He’s shopping it around to various festivals, around the city and around the world. He hasn’t had a lot of luck, but Paul knows he’s still very close to the beginning of his journey as a film maker. Over the next months he’ll be traveling, visiting far-flung relatives in many countries. He’ll be filming as he goes. When he comes home, he hopes to have material for a full-length documentary about the various places he visited.
When we got back to his house, we retired to the basement with his housemates, smoking grape flavoured Hookah, and drinking a fantastic Portugese port – a gift from his landlady. We realized that even this ‘unwinding’ project is going to be a lot of work Paul has a lot of attempts to go through, to find that one perfect take. I hope that with all my stumbling around on the bridge that that ‘one perfect take’ even exists. We end the night by planning the weekend; watching movies, not making them. Paul heads to his room as I leave. Is he sleeping? Typing in subtitles? Finding that one perfect take? The unwinding is over. It’s time to get back to the grind.
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