Many recent American documentaries have downplayed cinema's aesthetic possibilities, but Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen — which just won the Truer Than Fiction prize at the 2008 Spirit Awards — plays out its environmentalist politics by honoring the beauty of the nature threatened by unchecked land development in Austin. Focusing on developer Gary Bradley and the threat his plans pose to Barton Springs, a natural spring-fed pool, Dunn combines a variety of textures, from new footage shot with the Sony F900 HDCAM and Super-16 to TV news footage dating back to the '70s. The offline edit was done in Final Cut Pro on a G4 Power Mac, and the online was handled on the Avid DS Nitris. Executive produced by Terrence Malick, The Unforeseen shows his influence everywhere. Not content merely to luxuriate in gorgeous imagery, The Unforeseen describes the battle between liberal and conservative activists in Texas and offers a surprisingly sympathetic character study of Bradley. It opens this week at Cinema Village in New York City and will premiere on the Sundance Channel later this year.
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Left: Part of a new suburban development outside Austin.
A desert prospector walks beneath a highway overpass.
Developer Gary Bradley
Naturally spring-fed swimming hole Barton Springs
Robert Redford at Barton Springs
New suburban development outside Austin, TX
Comments (2)
1.
The trailer is very interesting, but it is not HD. It is 1/2 the frame size of 720 HD. MPEG4 encoding doesn't make a trailer HD, nor because it was shot in HD/s16mm Film...
Posted by Jake Hawkes on Thursday, February 28, 2008 @ 08:18 PM
2.
You're right -- I changed the link at the last minute because the system I was working on was having a hard time loading the full-size trailer. But if you click the "H.264 Quicktime HD (720p)" link at the top of the same page, you'll get the hihger-res version of the trailer at what looks like 1280x720p (it's definitely 1280)-- which counts as HD, no?
Posted by Bryant Frazer on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 @ 08:42 AM
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