Movie making

I didn’t set out to make a movie last weekend—it just happened. As the Digit Festival neared, I hinted to my son-the-filmmaker and my husband-the-filmmaker-before-him, that the occasion presented an opportunity to garner accolades artistic and monetary. Nobody bit.

My husband, who was a wiz with an old Bolex film camera, has yet to master the video camera passed down to him from our son. The son is busy wooing an actress in the city, and editing his first feature-length film.

It was up to me to uphold the family film cred. But that is not what I was thinking when I pulled out my pocket Canon on Saturday night and started shooting.

Inspiration lit earlier that weekend—at the Digit opening on Friday night at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance (DVAA) on Main Street in Narrowsburg, NY. Digital installations filled the loft gallery upstairs. The 2008 Grand Prize winner, “Digit ½” by Ron Littke, made me laugh out loud. A tribute to Fellini’s “8 ½,” the film is a three-minute gem, shot entirely in Narrowsburg during the three-day festival as the video slam rules dictate.

Pat Carullo, a local digital artist who was one of the forces behind the original idea for Digit, combines carved rock and wood sculpture with old Macintosh computer terminals, i-Pods, wooden frames, cds, floppy disks and window transoms with flat screen monitors to make art that is both visually exciting and politically stimulating. His piece at Digit was a fully self-contained video on an i-Pod seated on a rock pedestal. It wasn’t technologically possible a few years ago.

But Friday passed without me taking out my camera. On Saturday morning my husband and I rolled up the hill to town for an 11:00 a.m. workshop with Conrad Gleber about digital storytelling. Gleber works with students at LaSalle University in Philadelphia. He gets them to think about telling a story using audio and video by talking first. A written script, he says, always sounds wooden and lifeless compared to the spontaneity of a human being searching for words and infusing the tale with emotion.

One young student’s voice-over recording told of an alcohol-induced car crash. Gleber suggested that the filmmaker use a technique of disconnecting the narrative timeline, editing the middle, beginning and end randomly to disrupt the viewer’s expectations and heighten awareness and anticipation. It worked magic on the simple but powerful tale, that was combined with footage of a car being driven through traffic at night.

I left the workshop enthused about story-telling on many levels. I already combine my poetry with photography. (My new book of river photographs and poems, “River/Muse,” is at the River Gallery in Narrowsburg.) But I had yet to explore the fully integrated world of moving images and sound. The new technologies make it so simple even a writer can do it.

So, after the Digit screenings on Saturday night at Tusten Theatre, I was fully inspired. The town of Narrowsburg was lit with screenings of digital art and alive with festival patrons enjoying it. A huge earth-moving machine was used as a screen for a slide show of Renaissance art. Storefront windows screened works by Gleber. The DVAA balcony showed “currents,” an installation by Mat Rappaport.

I began shooting with my pocket Canon, the one I take everywhere just in case, as we walked from the theater to Main Street and continued shooting little video clips, not knowing what “story” I was telling. When I got home, and after a late dinner watching Saturday Night Live, I got to work. By 4:15 a.m. my little film was ready and I went to bed.

Although I did not have a narrative script, the story of a little town, lit by its people and their art had come alive in the making.