Assembly filmmaking and challenges for musicians

This weekend has been a continuous turnstile of handing off Assembly projects. The filmmaking step, which took place last week, was the most difficult stage to find (and keep!) participants. Understandably, filmmakers are more reluctant to take on projects as they need a camera, sound and lighting equipment, editing gear, and have to find actors and locations in order to work. They can often be as excited as writers and musicians to take on a project, but find themselves overwhelmed once inside.

Many complained of the short time frame to produce their piece. One week?! After commiserating with them, because really we’re filmmakers like them (Risa too! read on…), we broke out the story of our music video making competitions which give people 24 hours to make short films from local bands’ songs. Perhaps more time is actually a hindrance in some ways. It’s like the procrastinator’s habit of expanding into whatever time limit is given. No matter how long you have before something is due, you space your work to fill the time and end up with the same level of stress you would have with less time.

We met yesterday at Art Café with the musicians creating film scores to explain the state of each film and collectively problem-solve our way along. Each Assembly project has its own story, beyond the story in its words and images. We’ll be publishing the development of each draft from rock opera to film script to movie to scored film to live performance and mapping the many handoffs in the Assembly Zine, which will be available at the Assembly Screening on March 10th at Friendship Cove.

Here’s how things looked as of our meeting yesterday:

Assembly1 was taken on by the super enthusiastic Paul Neudorf and Tamara Kramer who have come to every assembly meeting and smiled and asked questions as we figured out how everything worked. They filmed on Sunday and edited on Wednesday and by Saturday had finished their piece. Tamara came by my apartment yesterday with an external hard drive and together we uploaded their film into Celtx.

Assembly2 got handed off to Jay Bulckaert who joined teams with Josh Usheroff. Neither knew each other before the assembly, but both asked to be paired with another person in order to be able to make their film. They were excited about learning from another filmmaker’s style. By Friday, they had encountered too many production problems and had to stop. Their script called for two sets of twins and other hard-to-find items. The scriptwriter, Louis Pearson, knew that filmmakers had the right to change his work as much as they wanted in order to make it possible to film, and had written it exactly how he imagined it. But most filmmakers seemed reluctant to make sweeping alterations to another person’s work. Jay and Josh actually wrote a new version of the script, adapting the original work, but ultimately couldn’t finish their filming.

The musician taking on this piece is using the script re-write instead of a completed film. This way, the work of Jay and Josh will still get to be passed on and used to build the next step of the assembly. The musician plans to film himself reciting the dialogue and will project this image behind him while he performs a guitar-based soundtrack for the script.

Assembly3 was being made by the ever-indyish Tristan Brand, who has photographed and filmed many an indyish event, as well as working on our staff, especially relating to the upcoming fringe collaboration. A family emergency took him away from the project midweek at which point Risa, who was planning to help Tristan, stepped in and started playing with possible alternatives to losing the film entirely. Digging into the indyish photo archive, Risa used staff photos Tristan had taken earlier in the month along with photos from past events and created an animated gif with myself, Risa, Tristan, and indyish staffer and assembly writer John, as the main characters in this script.

Assembly4 has the most detailed script breakdown of images, sounds, characters, and locations of any assembly projects. The writer, Dave Schultz, had hoped to be present for the filming of his script or at least be in communication with the filmmaker in order to relay his ideas. Lela Quesney took on his script and initially asked to switch with someone, feeling that the writer’s vision was too strong to leave any room for a filmmaker’s creativity. Later that day, she decided to stick with the script after finding a way to adapt Dave’s work into something that she felt she could produce. Though she worried about offending Dave with her changes, she went ahead and created a great live animation about a character that appeared in the original script.

Assembly5 is still in the hands of Toronto musician, Gabe Knox, who jumped in early last week when another filmmaker couldn’t take part. He’s working on a flash animation for Roseanne and Anurag’s script and should pass it off later today.

Assembly6 is being worked on by safe solvent’s Marty Reisch and Lara Kaluza. They have taken part in every previous indyish film event and have done incredible work so far. Their piece will be finished today and will get handed off to the patiently waiting Tino Scafidi to start making its soundtrack.

Assembly7 was given to Kendra Walker who encountered difficulty rendering her work in finalcut. At the end of the filmmaking stage, I sat down with local bluegrass group, Lake of Stew, and figured out a way to work around the filmmaking problems. The script Kendra filmed is a poetic epic that draws on a range of musical and written works from the past, including some old spirituals. Lake of Stew often play these very songs and are great at telling stories through characters. We decided to give Lake of Stew the original script to adapt into a song. Kendra got in touch with the group and will be providing production stills and some video segments from the raw footage she’s able to salvage to be projected behind the group as a storytelling device when they perform.

So many changes and adaptations…finding ways to work with what you’re given…building a story out of creative connections. This is exactly what the Assembly is all about.