Cinema Canada (Aug 1979)

photo: Vivienne Kugler Independent, Parisian filmmaker Yves Roland: in France, Super 8 is a respectable and professional form of filmmaking came into play. She went on to say that the Council has a maximum grant of $40,000 per project and will fund everything from inception to release. It has a planning grant that covers from one to three months and allows the applicant to come back in the same year for production funds. It will fund blow-ups of films that have already found a non-commercial market, but it will not fund prints — except to save the decaying negatives of established artists (a job that Ms. Picard insisted properly belonged to the National Archives). Although the Council does not currently engage in fund distribution, it may in the near future. Picard said she is currently looking into the applicability to Canada of a scheme that has worked well in the U.S. for the National Endowment for the Arts. In the past two years, Catherine Wyler has booked independent shorts into 3600 commercial theatres across the country. The response from public and theatre-owners has been so good that she is enlarging her operation and working to include features. Questions came from the floor, mostly dealing with how to apply for grants and how the Council decides who to fund. Ms. Picard was happy to answer. She denied that the Council has a rating system and that it favors name artists over unknowns. Selection, she said, is made by a panel of artists working in the field. They examine applications and samples of the applicants’ work, looking for evidence of talent and artistic growth. To the charge that this might, consciously or unconsciously, lead to favoritism, she replied that the Council changes its panels regularly and tries to vary them. She added that all panels are quick to spot and reject the inept budget — whether padded or starved. Sponsored films are also frowned on, as are films that already have a significant portion of the rights sold off. 22/Cinema Canada For filmmakers wishing to jump to 16mm or to radically change their work, she recommended the Council’s Explorations program. Although it is no part of her job or the Council’s mandate, Picard said she put effort into finding appropriate backing for films she thought should be made, but that weren’t Canada Council material. Potential backers for S8 filmmakers were mentioned in some of the other workshops. In their talk on Applications of S8 to Research, Jake Pauls of the National Research Council and Ben Barkow, a Toronto behavioral psychologist, presented The Stair Event, a film sponsored by the National Research Council. Barkow and Pauls’ purpose was to make a research film that would alert its intended audience of architects and planners to the practical considerations of safety when designing stairwells. To do this, they used multiple cameras in long shot and extreme close-up to catalogue the climbing patterns, accidents and near-accidents in major Canadian sports arenas. The result was a film that made its points in a clear, precise manner and, through its candid camera content, managed to be surprisingly entertaining. Susanne Swibold and Elizabeth Garsonnin presented “Tracking Dinosaurs with S8” — the result of their contract with the Alberta Provincial Museum to document the fossiland-footprint excavations of the Peace River Expedition. “Physiotherapy and S8” and “S8 in Education” suggested hospitals and boards of education, respectively, as sources of work. Back at the panel discussion on funding, Gunther Hoos told the audience that the real money in S8 was found in transferring it to video, where the image is indistinguishable from that shot in any other format. He pointed to the success of Andrew Pearson’s half-hour documentary, Adrift in the World: Indochina Refugees, made for the ABC network. Pearson did the film with a crew of two and a budget of $10,000. While it can be criticized for being less a documentary look at life in a refugee camp and more an emotional appéal for Americans to support their former Vietnamese allies, the film is a thoroughly professional bit of work that looks very good on a television screen. Further support for Gunther Hoos’ view came from TRM Labs of Toronto who gave festival-goers guided tours of their video transfer facilities that include a version of “wet gate” printing to eliminate scratches and capacities for color correction, image enhancement and opticals. The TRM representative stressed that there was a lot of work in industrial films shot in S8 and transferred to video. Guided tours were also given by C.F.A. Labs. They specialize in blowing $8 up to 16mm and have the capacity to do it very fast and without any appreciable quality loss. Gunther Hoos stressed the importance of achieving broadcast quality in the transfer, a goal requiring a good transfer done by a solid method. With transfer time at $250 to $350 an hour, leading to costs of up to $1,300 for a half-hour film, the process requires good technical knowledge and self-discipline from the filmmaker. Most of the problems he’s seen involve the lack of these qualities, especially in knowing the limits of the medium and the established standards of broadcast quality. He also mentioned problems with “defensiveness and ghetto mentality” in the S8 community. Some festival-goers put a lot of effort into overcoming their technical ignorance. Not only was the trade show packed