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Ben Barrett-Forrest educates and entertains in his impressive paper-letter animation The History of Typography.

“I was researching things I could shoot while over there and of course contacted the ballet to investigate whether it could sustain a compelling short, instead of just a fluff piece about the glory of the ballet. I’m not particularly into ballet, but my background in competitive swimming drew me to the concentration and dedication unique to a high-performance athlete.”

After convincing an understandably skeptical PR woman at the Bolshoi Ballet company that he wasn’t a crazed stalker (The Prodigy pre-dated the recent acid attack on the company director) and wanted to in fact create a character study of depth on a single dancer, they together discussed who may be suitable for the documentary’s focus:

“With the PR woman, I identified a couple of potential candidates, doing further research to determine which might be the best fit. Olga Smirnova fit the bill on all counts. She’s beautiful, but incredibly focused to the point that her crazy dressing room mates do not faze her. Trust me, this is something. Everyone seems to walk on egg shells there, and personal/social drama is pretty ridiculous. We saw it firsthand when one of them came bursting in screaming at us during our interview with Olga. Not speaking Russian, I was able to simply play dumb much of the time. With a careful journalist’s eye on not exactly getting in the way, I was able to follow a little closer and maybe get a little more access simply because nobody told me “nyet”. I discussed this common approach with my producer Fyodor, and he was completely on board to facilitate it, whether guiding me to something he overheard in Russian, or running interference while I pushed on.”

The team were granted shooting access for two morning sessions and two performances, but were unable to secure permission to film Smirnova away from the Bolshoi, where Sugrue had hoped he could fully round out the portrayal of her life as a dancer. This limited performance access came scarily close to being even more reduced when Sugrue accidentally formatted, and began shooting over, a Red card which hadn’t yet been offloaded whilst walking with Smirnova as she moved from stage to dressing room. Miraculously, proving his chops as a Russian cyber-sleuth, AC Dima Solovyov was able to bring the ‘lost’ footage back from the brink, to much relief. Avoiding further calamities Sugrue moved into post, working with a paper edit of the transcribed interviews with Smirnova and her coach:

“I then played around with the order and flow, knowing that much of the short film would be driven by b-roll and score. I tried to hold on shots much longer than I normally would have, knowing how much I enjoy studying the frame when given the opportunity. This is quite against my instinct for the commercial work, but much more inline with what I like narratively.

I hooked up with the composers via the internet. Patricio Jose Sanchez’s track is the main undercurrent, and Steve Nossiter’s is the part during the performance. I worked especially close with Steve to make sure the beats and edit were paced to enhance each other. It was a really fun shoot, and I’m really glad I stayed a couple of extra days to shoot something for myself.”

A working projectionist discusses his career and love of cinema with Austrian filmmaker Carlo Hofmann in A Man in the Box.

Record stores and collectors have been a popular subject for documentary makers in recent years, with up and coming directors Sean Dunne and Jeanie Finlay both exploring the subject in their films. Reminiscent of Dunne’s 2009 short The Archive, Richard Parks’ 22-minute documentary Music Man Murray delves in to the life of an avid record collector who has dedicated much of his existence to building a record shop that he’s now trying to sell.

We spoke to Parks, eager to find out what attracted him to Murray Gershenz’s story and what it was like capturing his story:

“I love records, but as soon as I heard of Murray’s circumstances — trying to sell the collection, and nearing 90 years old — the records became the setting for a different story about leaving a legacy, nearing death, and — once I met Irv — about fathers and sons. So the story wasn’t just about analog formats or a man passed over by time, it was about something bigger/smaller than that. The store was the perfect place for this story to unfold, where Murray sits surrounded by the towering stacks of records he’s collected that, as Irv points out, he doesn’t have time to listen to. Murray’s story isn’t sad, though, which is one of the more pleasantly surprising things I found out in making this film.”

There’s a great scene in the film where Parks questions Murray about his decision to withdraw from a life of religion, the scene offers a real insight into the steel and passion of Gershenz’s character as he brushes off the question like an interview veteran:

“He wouldn’t give me a straight answer, but that’s one of the scenes that best encapsulates who Murray is! It’s pure Murray. We were able to talk about most everything, and he was very open and trusting on the whole. I can’t imagine entrusting somebody with such a personal story.”

So what’s next for Parks?

“Today, I’m cutting a short documentary about the Biosphere2 project — the closed ecological system in the Arizona desert that eight researchers locked themselves into for two years back in the nineties. I’ve been shooting a love letter to the antique Toyota truck set in Oakland, Calif. called HI-LUX. And I’m working on a cookbook for a restaurant. I’ve also been filming my father, the musician Van Dyke Parks, who’d make a good subject for a documentary.”

Follow @reechardparks

In this latest instalment of the enthralling documentary series from Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari we meet Christopher Dennis, who for the last nineteen years has been impersonating ‘The Man of Steel’. He can be found patrolling Hollywood boulevard along with some of his allies who include Wonder Women, The Hulk and Yoda. But nowadays Christopher Dennis, the Hollywood Superman, only flies in an emergency and shares a small apartment with his doting wife, Bonnie.

Dennis is a born again Kryptonian, he dons the famous red and blue outfit everyday in order to keep the lights on. He spends night after night searching Ebay for his next DC superheros themed steal, adding to his glorious shrine of Kai-El memorabilia – the couple’s Superman inspired hoard occupies almost every room in their small L.A apartment. But no heroes’ journey is without its challenges; along the way Dennis encounters stiff competition from a Spanish Superman battling for the honour to put a smile on everyone’s face.

Along with some fantastic camera work and truly beautiful music (which is no less than we’ve come to expect from the duo), this documentary explores imagination, love and a larger-than-life superhero.

“The work consists of his three responses to the location: painting his subjective vision, his interview responses to the questions I asked while he painted and the music that his visits to Burnham had inspired him to improvise.”

Not one to select projects due to their ease of execution, director Joseph Ernst hit the streets of London with a 100 year old hand cranked 35mm camera for documentary Londoners and even considered drilling a hole in his jaw to get the shot in experimental film Feeder. Joseph joins us to discuss finding projects that contain something of the unusual and the unseen.

I really wanted it to be about a community’s relationship with the camera.

Showlinks
Joseph Ernst Projects
@joseph_ernst
Joseph Ernst
Londoners
Feeder
Photographic Hire

Feeder (2009)
A short film that will make you feel sick.

Londoners (2012)
Shot entirely on a 100 year old wooden hand-cranked 35mm camera, LONDONERS documents modern day London as you have never seen before. It shows the city as a community: a snapshot of contemporary history about what it is like to live in London today.

And here’s the Londoners’ trailer in all its Bat for Lashes scored glory:

After discovering that Osmium was used to detect crime scene fingerprints, it seemed the obvious element for Stil to make a film around given her lifelong fascination with hands:

“I’ve always had a fascination with hands. I think you can tell a lot just by looking at hands. Some hands are strong, tough and some are gentle and fair. Since I moved from Holland to London 2 years ago. I started to play a game in the tube. When I’m sitting in the tube I look at the hands of the passengers around me and I start to make up my own story that connects to the hands. When the person leaves the tube I look up and try to see if my imagination/story was a bit true.”

Running the element, its uses and her tube game together over a few weeks, she hit upon the idea of a film which would focus on the hands of prisoners and, as osmium detects fingerprints, would attempt to detect the stories of the individuals behind the fingerprints. Gaining access to a prison willing to allow the filming however, proved to be a much more arduous task:

“It was really difficult to find a prison that wanted to cooperate making the film. After a lot of phone calls, emails, interviews and screenings, the prison in Houten was willing to help. Together with Nils Post, the cinematographer, we went to prison for 3 days. We first asked the prisoners if they wanted to be in the film. I made a letter/quitclaim on which they could decide what they were willing to do: 1. Filming of hands. 2. Interview. 3. Filming everything. Most prisoners didn’t want to be filmed, but at the end of our 3 days in prison we recorded ten interviews. I held the interviews in a detective office and tried to make a comfortable atmosphere even when the police officer was standing in the corner, arms crossed in front of his belly, for protection. Most prisoners were really happy to be out of the cell and were willing to talk. I could feel their loneliness, their incapacity and tried to capture that in the interviews.”

The phrase ‘Wash away your sins’ infused the project, with the fingerprinting of prisoners requiring them to wash the ink away, while Stil had to position those hands regularly for the camera, which left her feeling compelled to wash her hands after hearing the crimes those hands had committed. It was a powerful experience that followed Stil beyond the walls of the prison:

“Every day, after the filming, when Nils and I walked out of the prison into the fresh air I felt so much relief I appreciated my freedom more. I’m grateful that I could take a peak into the prison world and experience how it feels to be locked up, but after making this film I’m even more grateful to be living in a free world.”

After getting stuck into research about the beginnings of Motion Design, which invariably lead them to the history of the opening title, Berlin Motion Design students at the BTK (Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule) Nora Thoes and Damian Pérez selected over 100 film examples of title design which they compared and contrasted to demonstrate how the craft has progressed over the decades. The pair structured their analysis around a set of key questions:

Once the analysis stage was complete, a grid was constructed within After Effects to house the film clips and the voiceover text that walks us through the history was written and recorded, a process that all in all took two months.

Here are some shots of their working desktops that Thoes and Pérez were kind enough to share with DN:

One of the few directors we’d trust to guide us through the web of lies at the centre of The Great Hip Hop Hoax documentary is our dearest of filmmaking friends Jeanie Finlay. Jeanie joined us for a pre-SXSW World Premiere chat about making her bromance gone wrong feature and how she went about documenting the truth when her lead protagonists were self-confessed liars of epic proportions.

There was a moment at the beginning of the film where I just thought, “Well am I being lied to & what am I being lied to about?”

Showlinks
The Great Hip Hop Hoax
Jeanie Finlay
Sound it Out Interview
Sony PMW-EX3
Canon EOS 7D

The Great Hip Hop Hoax (2013)
Californian hip-hop duo Silibil n’ Brains were going to be massive. What no-one knew was the pair were really students from Scotland, with fake American accents and made up identities. A film about truth, lies and the legacy of faking everything in the desperate pursuit of fame. The American dream, told by people who’d never even been to America.

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God looks at the cover up of sexual abuse by the Catholic church. It seems no one knows exactly when the cover ups began, but what is certain is that they’ve been ongoing for a long time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), was not only complicit in that cover up but a fundamental part of it. Gibney’s documentary begins by examining the sustained abuse of deaf boys at a Catholic school by a priest. The story bares out the pattern of abuse that we’ve become familiar with through numerous newspaper exposés; a person in a position of trust abuses children safe in the knowledge that children are seen and not heard. In this case, the abuse was made all the worse as when the children came forward they were further disbelieved due to their disability. Abuse of children is always shocking, but when you discover the hearing community didn’t believe the children, in part because they were deaf, it makes you wonder how blinded by bigotry a community can be.

As the abused children became adults they launched an action against the church that went all the way to the Vatican. What Mea Maxima Culpa uncovers does not just relate to their abuse but abuse worldwide. From the priest who assaulted the deaf children being known as an abuser and retired due to ‘ill health’ instead of being brought to justice, to the attempted rehabilitation of paedophile priests it can be strongly argued that the church was more concerned with ensuring its reputation remained untarnished than the welfare of its most vulnerable worshippers.

The revelations are shocking even to those who have been following the abuse scandals since they hit the news. At times the revelations have the feel of an episode of Brass Eye. If Chris Morris came up with the idea of sending all paedophile priests to an island in the Caribbean so they were segregated in paradise we’d laugh at the clearly preposterous idea. Not so in the Catholic church as this was actually a mooted solution.

Sight unseen, some may dismiss the revelations presented in this documentary as scaremongering and perhaps not entirely true. To those people I suggest watching it with an open mind – it’s not the scandal alone that could bring down the church, but the substantial payouts which are likely to follow any findings of liability. With an extremely limited release in the UK it’s probably not in a cinema near you but seeing as Mea Maxima Culpa is a HBO documentary I’m hoping that it will hit DVD soon and iTunes maybe even sooner.

For his latest feature documentary Grasp the Nettle, director Dean Puckett gave up his normal life to live with activists in the Kew Bridge echo village and democracy village on parliament square, documenting not only the lives of the residents but also the wider societal issues their various movements attempted to address. Dean joins us to discuss the practical challenges of shooting the film and getting beneath the surface veneer by committing to a ‘method documentary’ filmmaking approach.

Often the intention is not the reality & I think that’s what I became fascinated with[…] I just felt there was this really interesting friction between idealism & reality.

Showlinks
Grasp the Nettle
The Crisis of Civilisation
Canon A1 XHD

Grasp the Nettle (2012)
Grasp the Nettle follows the exploits of a ragtag band of land rights activists in London as they struggle against corporations, government, police – and themselves – in their efforts to create alternative communities outside the framework of consumer society.

David Lynch goes all industrial in his latest short film Idem Paris, a stark black & white look into the workings of the Idem Paris fine art printshop.

There have been numerous films which look in to the porn industry and the lives of the performers who make their living there, but very few have stuck around to see what becomes of those who move onto pastures new. Bryce Wagoner’s feature documentary After Porn Ends answers the question of what next for porn stars who leave the industry behind. Bryce joins us to discuss how the offer of an acting job led to his directorial debut and why shot lists may be for pussies, but can save your life during the edit.

I always like to start my questions as a conversation. I think that’s important for all documentary filmmakers.

Showlinks
@bryceless
After Porn Ends
Shield Pirate
Panasonic AG-HVX200
Panasonic AG-HPX500

After Porn Ends (2010)
After Porn Ends, is a documentary that not only examines the lives and careers of some of the biggest names in the history of the adult entertainment industry; but what happens to them after they leave the business and try to live the average lives that millions of others enjoy.

Whateverest is a documentary about the unlikely inspiration behind a dance tune produced by Todd Terje called “Inspector Norse”. “Inspector Norse” is the internet alias of Marius Solem Johansen, a failed musician living in a small town, producing dance videos and drug recipes for YouTube.

While UK kids were entertained on Saturday afternoons by aged overweight wrestlers, in the US wrestling was a much more glamorous affair thanks to GLOW and the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Director Brett Whitcomb and writer Bradford Thomason join us to discuss the role of the writer in documentary filmmaking and how tapping into the show’s existing fan base proved to be an archival and funding boon.

You can’t just take a camera & point it at a situation for a year & then cut it together linearly & expect to have a film.

Showlinks
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling
Window Pictures Vimeo

GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012)
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling chronicles the rise and fall of the first ever all- female wrestling show through the stories of those who lived it. From the initial open-call auditions, to the grueling training with wrestling legend Mando Guerrero, to over-night success and global recognition, to the show’s sudden and unexpected cancellation in 1990, the GLOW girls recall their time on the show with a mixture of heartfelt nostalgia and tearful regret over injuries and the loss of friends. For some, the show was a brief foray into acting and a short-lived adventure on the way to a normal life. For others, that time in GLOW would impact and influence their lives for years to follow. For all of the women, working on GLOW was a unique and exciting experience that will bond them forever.

A combination of portraiture and vérité, mixed with a poetically impressionistic voice over, Alan Spearman’s As I Am is one of the most powerful documentary shorts we’ve featured here on DN. Alan joins us to discuss straddling the line between journalist and filmmaker and how Werner Herzog advice to ‘meet the glory’ has positively impacted his work.

I’ve always heard ‘if you make something good it just gets out’, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever experienced it directly.

You can watch the full version of As I Am below:

As I Am (2012)
Chris Dean’s heart stopped when he was two. He died but he came back. When Chris was five, his father was murdered, riddled by more than 20 bullets in a gang shootout. At age 18, Chris gained national attention when he introduced President Barack Obama at his high school graduation. Chris is an observer and philosopher who has always had a few things to say about life from his vantage point in South Memphis. He and Emmy-Award winning filmmaker Alan Spearman walked the neighborhood for eight weeks observing and recording what became the script of As I Am. This film floats through this remarkable young man’s landscape, revealing the lives that have shaped his world. Poetic and powerful imagery, captured by Spearman and cinematographer Mark Adams, combines with the young philosopher’s trenchant observations about life.

Kurtis Hough’s approach to filmmaking may best be described as the ‘patient experimental cinema of nature’. He makes his third appearance on DN today with Warm Earth, Which I’ve Been Told and Cryosphere, a pair of films which both fall into that category whilst expanding the inventive creativity we’ve come to expect from Kurt’s work through the years.

I wasn’t gonna do a film about a glacier without somewhat addressing global warming but I didn’t want to do it in a heavy handed way.

Showlinks
KH Studios
Vimeo
B&H Photo
Adobe After Effects

You can watch Kurt’s latest film Cryosphere right now:

Warm Earth, Which I’ve Been Told (2012)
A planetary eye on a passing day in the universe.

Jonathan Minard and James George’s infinite conversation Clouds is a computational documentary which explores the beauty of code through the new technique of volumetric video. Jonathan and James join us to discuss navigating the bleeding edge where filmmaking and technology meet.

What’s been a very exciting thing about this project is actually realising & inventing a new medium in the process.

Clouds Materials
Screenshots

Showlinks
Deepspeed Media
James George
WebGL
Studio for Creative Inquiry
RGDDToolkit
Processing

Kickstart Clouds

As Jonathan and James mentioned in our interview, Clouds: beta was but the first step along the road to creating a truly interactive documentary using technology to create a brand new visual aesthetic and they need your help to fully realise the project.

CLOUDS is created with the RGBDToolkit — an open-source software library we have developed for 3D filmmaking with the Kinect. Using a Microsoft XBOX Kinect depth sensor paired with an HD video camera, our toolkit makes possible the computer-graphic/video hybrid you see above. By supporting CLOUDS, you also support the development of the RGBDToolkit — helping to make it better for everyone. We welcome you to try it out!

Watch the campaign video below and be sure to head over to the Clouds Kickstarter page for more info and to pledge your support.