Guerrilla independents: thanks to today's affordable tools, pros can work anywhere

Post, March, 2005 by Christine Bunish

Portable, inexpensive but highly-capable editing and visual effects technologies are making the guerrilla independent lifestyle a reality for increased numbers of filmmakers, editors and visual effects specialists who seldom find themselves tied to conventional post facilities anymore.

ALL THAT JAZZ

When Ken Koenig (831-425-8836), a semi-retired psychiatrist from Santa Cruz, CA, was looking for something else to do with his time he decided to make a film.

Koenig grew up taking photos and using the 16mm camera his parents got for their wedding, so he's been an amateur shooter all his life. He augmented that knowledge with a course on digital video production and post production at Cabrillo College near Santa Cruz, where he made a seven-minute documentary on LA's premier jazz club of the 1950s and '60s, The Lighthouse. A jazz fan and amateur sax player since his teens, Koenig felt the story of jazz on the West Coast had been long overlooked.

Koenig wanted to take on a feature-length project and his son Eric, an animator and screenwriter in Hollywood, advised him to pick a topic that he knew something about and loved. So Koenig decided to expand on his short film with Jazz on the West Coast: The Lighthouse, a documentary about the club that was the center of the West Coast's "Cool School."

Koenig's seven-minute film became "a calling card for more participants" in the longer doc; they told him stories about the club, gave him background and led him to pictures and film clips. "I'd met a lot of them at jazz concerts over the years and had a passing acquaintance with Howard Rumsey, the leader and founder of the group the Lighthouse All-Stars," Koenig explains. "Through Howard I got to meet a number of people associated with the club."

His doc eventually became the story of "two widely-different men: bar owner John Levine and itinerant musician Rumsey. They came together in a small, seedy bar in Hermosa Beach, CA, in May 1949 and turned that bar into a jazz showplace known worldwide," says Koenig. He shot all the interviews on MiniDV with a Canon GL-2 camera and edited the doc at home on a PC-based system running Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, which he taught himself to use. He had cut his short doc with Premiere 6.5 during his Cabrillo College course.

"Premiere Pro is a much more powerful and stable program, and the titling works quite well," Koenig notes, "It was pretty easy to learn." He tapped Canopus Imaginate to process archival photos donated by the Los Angeles Jazz Institute, CTS Images and jazz photographer William Claxton.

"One of the things I learned was not to shoot these stills with my camera," Koenig points out. He came to realize that using a laptop and portable scanner would enable him to work with the photos digitally and give him a lot more flexibility than shooting stills with his film camera.

Koenig used Premiere Pro to burn his finished 77-minute doc to DVD. "I'll be learning Adobe Encore so I can do more DVD work," he notes. "I'd like to expand on the DVD with additional material of interest to fans: more wonderful stories, descriptions by Howard [Rumsey] of all the Lighthouse All-Stars' albums, a discography of the group," which played together from 1952-62.

Koenig has applied to some film festivals and hopes to have showings of Jazz on the West Coast: The Lighthouse in the LA area. "I'd like to attract some investors and apply for some grant money to turn this into a commercial project," he says. He also aims to show the doc in Europe and Japan where there's a great deal of interest in West Coast jazz. And the fledgling documentarian is already working on his next film, an "amazing" biographical story, also about jazz.

AN HD EDIT FOR MAN ABOUT TOWN

Like the proverbial mountain climber who tackles a challenging summit "because it is there," the editing team on director Mike Binder's upcoming feature, Man About Town, worked in HD with Apple's Final Cut Pro "because we could," says associate editor/post facility supervisor Jeremy Roush. "Why not step up to HD? It's where the industry is headed today. With an HD edit we're able to go 90 percent of the way toward finishing the film in the computer. It's a very different experience working closer to actual film resolution and seeing the picture as it's going to look when it gets to the theater. With no compression artifacts we're able to catch things we wouldn't have seen until much farther down the road in standard def."

The editors, headed by Roger Nygard who previously worked with Binder on the HBO series The Mind of a Married Man, have set up shop in a condo above Binder's Sunlight Productions' (www.sunlightproductions.com) office in LA. They have three Final Cut Pro HD systems running on Mac G5s with AJA Kona 2 cards for image capture and playback to HD monitors. They also run Apple's Shake for split-screen effects and Adobe After Effects for effects and paint. Apple xSAN provides Fibre Channel connectivity and 12TB of storage.

Man About Town, a dramedy starring Ben Affleck and Rebecca Romijn, was shot on Super 35mm in Vancouver and transferred to HD for editorial. "We got tapes from Mike daily, digitized them and began the edit," Roush explains. "We had a rough cut with temp soundtrack ready when he got back."