Some of you may know that I have been shooting a documentary for the last three years about opposition to Bush from within Bush country, both inside and outside the system, which will be called "Doolittle Raiders". It's far from completed, as I will actually be rotoscoping (animating) the film once I have the live action cut, thus making the feature length film a "documation". It will actually be animated to look like natural media (oil, watercolor), as opposed to looking like a cartoon, and I have based my look to keep with the theme, so I have chosen American realist painters to emulate, such as John Singer-Sargent (who oddly enough is regarded as American, but wasn't born here, and never lived here), Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper (many of you may have seen "Nighthawks" before: the famous diner painting), & Andrew Wyeth (did "Christina's World". The reason for it being animated is because I feel it actually much closer represents what reality has been like for the last few years, kind of this alternate reality that should have never existed.
At any rate, I just completed the rough cut of the live action raw footage for the first reel of the film (the first twenty minutes), and I've got to say, it's nice to finally start having some payoff, in terms of personal satisfaction, from this thing. I remember when I started the film, I just felt like I had to do SOMETHING, and being a filmmaker by trade, I thought I would put my skills to use for something good.
However, instead of aiming to make something like what Michael Moore was doing, I instead followed my personal documentarian hero, DA Pennebakker, who does his best NOT to inject himself in the story, whereby the perview of his films is limited to what his camera saw, and ONLY what his camera saw. In keeping with his tradition, there is no narration, per se, no god-like voice telling you what you should be gathering from the images you are seeing, and the story that is accumalating. Such a technique can be quite engaging, as exampled by Pennebakker's excellent films such as "The War Room", "Monterry Pop", & "Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back". It's personal and detached all at once.
In the first reel of my film, it goes from a protest in Crawford in 2003, to a early Howard Dean speech, to some words from the Texas 11, to "Al Franken" day in Austin, finishing up the reel with the arrival of Texans in Iowa for the primary, which will last about halfway through the second reel. What's great, to me at least, is it's starting to look like I accomplished what I set out to do, make a film regarding "partisan" topics, without making it a "partisan" film, not to knock Greenwald or Moore or anyone like that, I love their stuff, but my personality is different than their's, which lends itself more to a "fly-on-the-wall" method. After all the time, money, and effort I have spent on this, it's really cool to start seeing this thing come together, and I look forward to sharing it with as many folks as I can, I'll be taking out some adspace here once it's ready for prime time. Anyway, I'll continue to diary this thing as it comes along, and maybe post some of the frame outs with the completed animated look at a future date.