Picture this: we truck through the streets of the Red River district at dusk, the sun glowing on the horizon, casting its dramatic shadows against the city’s wandering inhabitants as they prepare themselves for another Friday night. We shoot the tops of buildings at play with the cranes. We shoot them at regular exposure once and then from the same angle with the gain on the camera pumped way up. Gain is typically used in extreme low-light situations – when used in the daytime, it creates a noisy, dirty, busy look in the frame. In post-production, we lay over the clean, perfectly-exposed image on the buildings under a high-gain image of the sky. We fade the gain from a particularly intense level in a halo around the buildings to a blue, regularly-exposed sky. The resulting effect: the city looks like it is glowing with grit. It is a strangely synergistic fit, as Sunset’s wonderful and haunting album is called The Glowing City.
It should be noted here that, while the bulk of our film is being shot on 2 glorious Sony Z7U-HDV cameras, we still plan to employ mixed media (ie. Black and white 16mm film, Canon GL-2 MiniDV, and the sneaky flip cams – ie. Belaire’s East and West Coast tours – more on those later). This opening sequence will be a veritable cornucopia of these formats.
Halfway through the sequence, the sun, well, sets. We return to the corners of Austin with the most musical activity: East Side streets housing venues like the warehouse, Red Scoot Inn, Victory Grille, North Loop, and back to the Red River district, the public epicenter of the film. We truck through as bands load in, fans line up, and all the colorful characters come out for the night.
It is here that we present all the performers in the documentary so the audience understands who they are later. As the great D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) once said, even if your documentary follows one or two people, they will be complete strangers to a distant audience. The issue multiples when you have an ensemble production like ours. Pennebaker also advises against “hanging signs” on the people you’re photographing (ie. John Blow, Architect, Rebel) or some such thing.
Related to this is my intense aversion to the typical “talking head” interview. Just watch a music documentary like American Hardcore to see what I mean. You have these powerhouse performers (Henry Rollins of Black Flag, H.R. from Bad Brains) sitting in a well-lit space telling us how we shoulda been there. We still have to bring forth the context of all the music we’re seeing, though, so we’re trying to structure our interviews as “conversations,” shooting with a long lens dialogues with various musicians, managers, press, writers, club owners, etc, as if we’re voyeurs watching something unfold through a crowd. I want to drift from band to band. I want the pace of the film to be as kinetic as the music it depicts. I also am trying to use the word “conversation” instead of “interview” because I was affected by something else Pennebaker said when asked why he avoids interviews. He said that when you point a question at a subject, you are giving the answer before they even open their mouth.
2) Back to Sunset. To my knowledge, Bill Baird is the only musician we are following that has been signed by a major label, in his case, Capitol, who controlled distribution for the terrific Movie Monster, the 2004 release from his previous band Soundteam. Capitol ultimately dropped Soundteam and they disbanded. There is something to be said for the driving endurance these artists all have in the face of this sort of disappointment. Austin’s lack of a music industry plays into this. As folksinger Trey Brown said recently, “We don’t have an industry here, we have a culture.” I hope to get insight on all this from Bill and perhaps other members of Soundteam.
{{{sunset}}} at Antone's 3) I think it’s also best not to dwell too much on what’s happened in the past. Robert and I have talked about creating a musical mosaic of one of Sunset’s songs, probably “You’ve Never Lived a Day in Your Life” (originally a Soundteam tune). The importance of the studio in Bill’s music can’t be overstated. He layers and affects many of the instruments he plays himself. The idea, while still not fleshed out, is to shoot Bill in a recording space as he creates a song from soup-to-nuts. We hope to shoot the master wide shot with an extremely high-definition camera (perhaps the newest RED cam) and have Bill perform the entire song instrument-by-instrument. This shot will be locked down on a tripod.
Transposed over this master shot will be a collection of other shots, filmed with multiple cameras (of lower screen resolution), each focusing on very specific details (fingers on keys, close-ups of Bill singing, adjusting levels, adding effects, etc. etc.) We we will need upwards of ten cameras, all at varying angles, to execute this.
{{{sunset}}}
When the song really gets going, the smaller frames could perhaps take us elsewhere (blinking city lights, hordes of people walking in slow motion, abstract, elegiac images). The sky’s the limit. The idea is that the master wide shot is what motivates the smaller images. As the song reaches its end, the frames disappear one-by-one, leaving Bill alone in the recording space. Beyond depicting a great song, hopefully this scene will speak to Bill’s innovation as well as what can be done with new technologies.
We don’t have the money to pull this off just yet, and it will require impeccable planning, but I don’t think the film we are making will be complete without it. We aren’t just documenting something. We are participants. For a distant influence to this, watch the scene in Gus Vant’s Last Days, where the Kurt Cobain character creates a cacophony of noise in his single room as the camera patiently pulls back. 4) Finally, Bill has a lot of ideas that he’s bringing to the project. He told us The Glowing City has always been a concept album. He wants us to shoot a long, unbroken shot of him riding a Greyhound bus to San Antonio, then a long, unbroken shot of his father, disheveled, riding back to Austin. Ideally the entire sequence will clock in right at 80 minutes, the exact length of The Glowing City album (which also happens to be the maximum amount of time a CD will allow). We’re down. It might only get played through a projector at a large gathering, but we are down. The fact is, the footage will exist, and I think that has value. Surely we’ll find a way to incorporate it into the greater film. After bringing up the idea, Bill talked about people turning on to Warhol in the mid-60’s partly because he had the capital to attract people. Hype and public perception can twist a direct image into something strange and grandiose. Perhaps it challenges us to look at life through an altered lens. I got through part of Warhol’s Empire, the eight-hour film depicting nothing but the Empire State Building lording over Manhattan. I’d be full of shit if I told you I enjoyed it, but I did gasp when a bird flew by, one of the film’s dramatic peaks. I started talking like this to Bill, flatly over-thinking it, and he said, “No, I want the bus shot to be oppressively boring.” And that was that. We’re checking Greyhound schedules. In conclusion, I’ll leave you with another quote from local troubadour Trey Brown, which we thankfully caught on film. “I think we’re just lightning rods,” he said, “and we have to be ready to raise ourselves up when the lightning comes.” “Where does the lightning come from?” I asked. “Necessity.”
