When Isaac Anderson got the chance to shoot a promo piece for a relief
organization rebuilding a medical center after the war ended in Kosovo,
he, then a film student, jumped at the chance. Little did he know at
that point that Mitrovica, a divided city of about 30,000 in the
Serbian province of Kosovo, would become almost an obsession for him
over the next seven years.
“It was right after the war and everything was fresh and scary over
there,” recalls Anderson. “I walked away with a bunch of footage and
was haunted by it. A couple years later I revisited the footage and
felt compelled to go back there and shoot more. At that point I didn’t
even know what the story was, which is not an ideal situation for a
documentary filmmaker. It ended up being a good networking trip,
meeting different people, hearing their stories and getting a little
more direction for the project.”
Anderson returned and started raising money for a documentary (the
majority of the money came from the sale of his own paintings at a
gallery in Laguna Beach). At the time, he wanted to make a documentary
detailing the volatile political and social fabric of this town of
about 30,000 people that, due to its proximity to the Trepca mines that
hold trillions of dollars worth of natural resources, had essentially
been the root cause of the war. At the end of the war, Albanians were
kicked out of their homes and Serbs took over the part of the city with
access to the mines. To this day, the Albanians continue to be
oppressed, riots are common, as is extreme poverty. Anderson shot many
interviews with Albanians who recounted horrific experiences during the
war and their continuing struggle, as well as other footage depicting
the Albanian culture, a task that was not as simple as it seemed as
Anderson would later discover.
Lessons Learned
Anderson edited a few short pieces together and posted them on his Web
site. When the films were seen by some of the people in Mitrovica, he
quickly learned what it means to be a documentary filmmaker.
“Some people from that town saw it and were totally offended and angry
with me, even though I was being supportive to their cause,” he
recounts. “I got a number of serious threats and was afraid to go back
out there. There were just some shots of the mosques and the calls to
prayer. They have been misrepresented as being fundamentalists for so
long they are hyper-sensitive to being represented that way.”
Besides facing the fact that he might have to stop production on his
documentary about this town, Anderson was humbled by having upset so
many people that he’d grown attached to during his time there. Instead
of giving up, however, Anderson re-examined his approach and the very
role of the documentary filmmaker.
“It ended up being a blessing in disguise and taught me a much-needed
lesson about being a documentary filmmaker. You can’t just go into a
place, look for the hardest-hitting stories and then leave and edit it
together so it has the highest impact,” he admits.
“Unfortunately, that’s the way a lot of documentaries are approached.
Here I was a 26-year-old, middle-class white kid thinking I could tell
their story and bring hope to them. I realized I was guilty of just
looking for these crazy stories, and essentially exploiting these
people, even though I had no intention of doing that.”
Finding the Story
Undaunted by the threats, Anderson returned to Mitrovica last year with
the intention of following the story of three sisters he had
interviewed in prior trips. But he still could not shake the thoughts
that even this was, in a sense, exploitative. Meanwhile, his friend,
Luli, who was born and raised in Kosovo, was developing a story for a
short narrative film that delved into the issues of life in post-war
Kosovo.
“The bells went off in my head and I realized he was the story,” says
Anderson. “His story tells the story of Kosovo, so I could approach the
subject through his eyes, without trying to put my vision onto Kosovo.
I’m just telling the story of this poor filmmaker trying to tell his
story but it opens the doors for me to explore a lot of the issue
without me forcing those doors open.”
And what of making a film that provided hope to the Albanians in Kosovo?
“The thing that is so amazing about this filmmaker is this sense that
everything is going to work out. Even having gone through these
horrifying tragedies these people come out with a sense of hope. I just
wanted to give a taste of Kosovo and show that this is not some far-off
place and culture that an outsider could never understand and show that
it’s not so different than the world we live in.”
Shooting and Editing on the Fly
Going back to Kosovo last year as a one-man crew, Anderson built his
kit around the Sony HVR-Z1U and Adobe Premiere Pro. “It was just me
carrying 200 pounds of gear. You could have made a short comedy film
about me trying to get all my equipment on and off the airplane,” he
says.
Still, he was able to put together a remarkably portable production and post studio.
“The size and the ergonomics [of the Z1U] made it great for this type
of shoot. I was able to strip it down and conceal it very well, or make
it more hardcore with the Century Optics' lenses and matte box. The
quality is great. Obviously, you have to know the limitations of the
camera but it’s pretty impressive. I shot 50i and de-interlaced it to
go for that film look. The camera’s got a pseudo 25p, 24p and 30p, but
it’s not a true progressive scan CCD, so you’re losing resolution,” he
says. “When you shoot 24p you lose around 50 percent of your vertical
resolution.”
Each day Anderson returned to transfer the footage of the day to the
LaCie hard drives via USB 2.0, using a Dell Precision M70 laptop and
Premiere, and encoding it as an AVI file using CineForm's Aspect HD
plug-in.
“I know I’m going to be rendering multiple generations of this project:
de-interlacing is one render, color correction, effects are another.
Native HDV just won’t hold up to that many renders, especially since I
want to go out to film for a theatrical release. I need to preserve
every bit of resolution possible,” he explains.
Doing it in the Dark
In addition to his portable shooting and post kit, Anderson had to rely
on battery power, as electricity in Kosovo is unreliable, to say the
least.
“I had a battery running my camera, which is acting as my VTR and is
connected to my laptop running on batteries connected to my USB 2.0
LaCie drive, which is running off bus power from my laptop. I was
literally able to capture HD footage from anywhere,” he says. “I’d
brought ten laptop batteries with me and there was always some time
during the day when the electricity was working so I could charge them.
But you never knew when that was going to be.”
Anderson also had to light without relying on power so he bought a
couple of halogen and LED lights, took them apart and re-wired them to
run off the Sony lithium ion batteries. “I don’t know if it was worth
the time it took me to build them, but they worked great.”
Finishing Up with Adobe Production Studio
Anderson is now back completing the rough cut of the film and is also
applying to Sundance for a grant. “At this point I’ve just tasted a few
of the new features of the Adobe Production Studio. The new interface
is great and the integration is really amazing,” he says. “Being able
to just open up my timeline in After Effects, change something and go
right back to Premiere is great. When I was doing the rough cut, I saw
some points where the audio needed to be tweaked and I could just
right-click on the clip and there it was in Audition.”
In addition, Premiere let him combine all the different formats and
frame rates in the same timeline. While 90 percent of the footage was
shot with the Z1U, he also used footage from prior shoots in PAL, as well as in 24p,
which he has been able to simply dump into the timeline.
“It’s nice to be able to conceptualize it during the editing process
without having to render it all first. Once I get a final edit then I
will do the render out and conform.” Anderson will deliver the product
in 24p on HDCAM, with the hope that it will get distribution and a
film-out.
Making the Documentary the Subject
While the main story of this documentary is the life of this Albanian
filmmaker, Luli, the other aspect, obviously influenced by the reaction
to Anderson’s short film on the Internet, is on the documentary process
itself.
“Part of this project is to raise the awareness with filmmakers and
audiences about what documentary filmmaking is all about,” he says.
“Here I am making a documentary about a guy making a fictional film,
but in many ways his fictional film has more truth in it than my
documentary. So I tried to be honest with that in the film. It’s
something audiences need to be aware of—that every time you turn on the
TV, you are subject to someone’s opinion.”
To convey this, Anderson doesn’t attempt to edit himself and his
questions to people out of the film and thereby eliminates any possible
confusion about the responses. In other parts, these issues are openly
discussed between Anderson and the main subject, Luli. In one instance,
Anderson was filming Luli as he walked in a building and missed a bit
of the action and the subject’s statement. Anderson asked Luli to
repeat the action and line again, which he happily did. Is this kind of
questioning and re-enactment of this scene completely ethical for a
documentary? Luli insists it is because it actually happened.
“But it didn’t happen just like it did. So I ask him to go back and do
it again but with more emotion, basically just in a different way. I’m
totally joking at this point but he goes back and does it,” Anderson
says laughing. “It definitely shows the audience that this type of
thing happens all the time on documentaries and [we want the audience]
to be aware of it.”
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