On the Making of Fiberboard '72. (Bolex shoot)

Rain. Sweat. Dedication. Fun. More rain. Bruises. Losing my keys. Tons of wet clothes. And even more rain. All of these different words sum up my experience on Saturday with the one shot using the Bolex. It wasn’t the first time I used a Bolex (FST 302 doc for our parkour doc) so I didn’t get the chance to film but I don’t care, I just love shooting with the Bolex. I love the black and white grainy look; it reminds me of the 1920s and 30s and silent films. But anyways, on to the shoot…

So we started out helping Joselyn’s group with their project which was full of choreography and crazy dance moves all around. What made it even better was Joselyn’s costume box as I think it helped everyone get more excited and establish a “character” to portray in the shot. I feel bad though because we rushed the timing on it because we thought we only had 28 seconds to shoot when really we had a whole minute. Even though we did rush through it and every rehearsal we moved a second faster, I think the turnout was still really awesome and in editing they will be able to do some cool stuff to make it that much better. I just want to go on the record and say I wasn’t one of the ones to tell them to speed it up but when someone said 28 seconds I thought it was right because we were underexposing, or speeding up the film rate, so I thought the film would process faster… in my head it made sense but I was wrong. We all make mistakes though, and like I said their footage was still pretty good, even with the f-stop being off and the processing not turning out exactly as well as it could have.

After we helped them though we started our project. We were going for a Vietnam flashback. We wanted to have a couple, lovingly together, and when the woman finds out the man is a vet (Even though he was wearing a army jacket), she rages and proceeds to chop him, then beat him up with the fiberwood. She is running from his past and from the war. After we see this action, we see the Veit Cong in the woods creeping out. We go back to the girl who sees the man getting back to his feet and going after her. She escapes though. All of the Viet Cong emerge from the forest and chase after the man who was in war, he can’t escape it. The girl makes one final strike at the man and she is able to leave him and his past alone, as he will forever be tied to the war and unable to escape the battles he once took. Ok, so that is my personal meaning of it all, and it can be understood if watched closely or several times, but I believe the message is clear. I just want to say thanks to Joselyn for helping us out and being the female lead. Everyone should watch out for her tiger strike… it’s pretty crucial. After we shot it and processed (which it turned out well), we watched it in the negative version and I am satisfied with it. We only did two rehearsals before shooting as well so I think for only trying this out three times we nailed it. I can’t wait to take the footage into Final Cut and change the image to a positive and add sound and other craziness. This was probably my favorite assignment we have done so far because we all worked together as a class to help each other out and the ideas for the projects were great. It made the day entertaining, even with the rain. I know we probably won’t have time to do it again but I would have loved to do this without rain, I think we could have had a better turn out and more people willing to help. But by the end of the day everyone was wet and tired and we just wanted to get done with it all and get some food. One idea was even to just go to taco bell and film us eating tacos because we were so hungry. But we toughed it out and filmed what we planned. Like I said, be on the lookout for Fiberboard ’72, it’s gonna be an instant classic.

LWR