My latest 25-minute veterans documentary: “Eleven”

“Eleven” is my latest 25-minute documentary that explores the lives of eleven veterans who have served from World War II up until today. This film was a project of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at The University of Connecticut.

Interesting backstory; Dr. Brian Chapman, Director of Outreach and the OLLI program, is my former employer.  I worked for the OLLI program during college and continued to work there after I had graduated.  During my time there, I helped promote the program through shooting promotional films and the like.  I have since moved on to shooting and directing full time, however Dr. Chapman and I have remained in contact, and he thus approached me to produce a film for OLLI’s annual Special Veterans Day ceremony at the campus.  Last year, Dr. Chapman and Lucien Lafreniere (producer on Eleven) were able to screen James Gandolfini’s WarTorn for the event before it was even released.  This year, they approached me to collaborate on a film of our own for the event.  For anyone who has seen WarTorn, this is a very high watermark.  It is an incredibly powerful film.

Ours would be slightly smaller in scope production-wise, however the stories are just as tremendously moving.  Eleven features military veterans that have served in conflicts ranging from over 70 years, starting from World War II.  This film also captures a breadth of experience that is very unique – you will hear experiences from men and women from all different branches, deployments, and training specialties.  The film aims to capture what their service meant to them, how it impacted them, and how their lives were changed after they served.  The film serves to commemorate these individuals and preserve their legacy, and also the rich first-hand isight into the conflicts during which they served.

It was an honor to be involved in this project.  It was humbling to take part in a project that would commemorate and preserve the history of the fine men and women who have served our country.  Having worked with both Dr. Brian Chapman and Lucien Lafreniere at OLLI for some time before this project, I was fortunate to thus have a working-shorthand with them.  Dr. Chapman served as an executive producer for this film, helping us form the overarching message of the film and also serving as our liaison with UConn for production on-campus.  Lucien Lafreniere is a Special Assistant to the Director at OLLI; he is also a UConn undergrad and also president of the VA’s Connecticut Chapter.  Lucien served as a producer and his role was vital in finding the veterans interviewed in this film.  He is also the person interviewing the veterans in the film.  You can see him in a few of the wide shots!

Production lasted only 2.5 days, with a time period of about 3 weeks to edit the film before the premiere; we shot about 20 hours of footage.  Post production was not fun.  I have since made a number of polishing edits to the film before uploading to the web – however least it be to say that I was working on this film until literally hours before it premiered due to the time constraint.  The idea to make a film as “filmic” as we did was a fairly last minute decision.  I believe this decision paid off tenfold however.

Technicals:  The film was shot on a Canon 5d Mark II, and a Sony HXR NX5U.  Audio was captured with a Rhode NT5 condenser microphone with audio running direct into the NX5.  The Canon barely has an option for on-board audio and is almost sonically defunct, so lots of syncing was necessary as the footage from the 5D was preferred due to its superior quality.  This added to the nightmare of editing on this film.  (There is a piece of software called Pluraleyes that does all of this automatically!) You will also see in some wider shots TWO microphones being used; this second mic was a Sony ECM-XM1 Shotgun Microphone that I had running into a separate Boss BR900 digital compact-flash recorder.  This was a safegaurd incase audio went down on the NX5.  I ended up mixing both together in the end.  The film is edited in Final Cut Pro, and I used Soundtrack Pro for various audio edits.  Grading was done entirely in three-way color corrector in FCP, and compressor used to convert the H264 footage from the 5D to ProRes422 24p.

Ah yes.  The score.  My good friend Jonas Friedman at Emerging Music Group scored our film without even seeing more than a few minutes of rough cuts.  Jonas and I have worked on a number of recordings in the past and he really came through for me on this project.  We had a few meetings initially in which I explained what the project would be, and played a few VERY rough minutes that I had edited.  The majority of our process was by email and phone, talking about various concepts and themes that I thought would compliment the film best.  Jonas not only delivered a fantastic score, but did so without seeing any of the finished film, and turned out 6 amazing pieces in about 3 weeks – he wrote, recorded, and mixed everything himself.  A testament to his talent and work ethic.  This guy is amazing and consistently proves that he is the best around.  Visit his website (link above) and listen to more of his work.  Get used to it – you will only hear more of him as the years go on.

I am very fortunate to have partaken in this film.  It is historically and socially significant.  As a novice filmmaker at the start of my career, this project really warmed up the idea of documentary filmmaking for me.  I have thought of myself in all the years prior as strictly a narrative guy.  For me, I typically thought of docs in the way of static cameras, poor composition.  However this is not true.  I learned on this project that documentaries can be visually compelling with regard to photography in addition to content – I have to thank Philip Bloom for his inspiration on this.  See some of his short documentaries here: www.philipbloom.net

Overall, I have found a new respect for peoples’ stories and also for documentary in general; it is really hard to do. There are no second takes.