out of the bath

Post-production is often the messiest and frequently the least highlighted stage of the independent filmmaking experience. Money for development can be dug up from the government, private sector or your own pocketbook. Then there are sponsors, relatives and fellow broke industry members to get you through production. But when the stock is shot and you’re out of resources, it’s another matter altogether. You may end up processing your film in the bathtub, or doing a sound edit on a Steenbeck in your living room.

So where are the support systems for posting in our subsidized industry? Without a distribution or broadcast deal, and therefore without Telefilm Canada money, there are the arts councils, which will take on a film at the fine-cut stage with some stipulations. For straight post-production assistance, the National Film Board’s Program to Assist Filmmakers in the Private Sector and its French equivalent, Aide au cinema independent – Canada, are it. Last fiscal year, 60 English and 32 French projects received assistance from pafps and acic, for a total of 47 hours of assisted footage.

Right now, there are approximately 45 acic projects underway, with 10 carried over from last fiscal year. pafps has 60 on the go, with 15 started up this fiscal year (since April 1), five turned down and 40 awaiting decisions. acic averages one project accepted for every four rejected.

Montreal kerfuffle

The recent kerfuffle in Montreal regarding the removal of acic’s co-ordinator, Arlette Dion – when 200 angry filmmakers stormed the nfb – is indicative of how much this program is needed.

This year, pafps is estimated at $750,000 and acic at $450,000.

The ‘established’ Canadian filmmakers – Denys Arcand, Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Alex Raffe – all used pafps at one point to get their films finished. Jeremy Podeswa, Midi Onadera and John Pozer are more recent additions to the list. But the bulk are the first-time, independent, or ‘small’ films such as the recent crop: I Lost My Purse in Perth, Proposal for Dog Brain, I Think I Can and J’ai trop de talent to name a few.

pafps and acic provide most post-production assistance in the form of printing and processing, with the filmmaker paying for the raw stock and nothing else. Edit suites, some optical work and, on occasion, a mix may be available.

An applicant gets assigned to an nfb producer, associate producer or a production co-ordinator who will then help determine how the program can best aid the production. Perhaps the biggest drawback is the time factor, based on the fact that pafps/acic projects come last in order of priority at the board.

Internal productions and coproductions receive time and technical services before pafps/acic projects, and that can leave a filmmaker waiting for months just to get a print.

‘The filmmakers have to work according to our schedule and that can be a handicap,’ says Linda Payette, post-production co-ordinator for the nfb Ontario Centre.

With the current cutbacks at the board, the programs may receive an unofficial review in order to deal with leaner internal resources. This is no casual affair, since the filmmakers who depend on pafps/acic have few resources to get their films made.

Sylva Basmajian, nfb Ontario Centre producer, remembers when Rozema and Raffe were working all through the night to get I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finished. Payette recalls when a filmmaker moved her bed into an edit space because she and her editor were doing double shifts.

Pozer jumped through metaphoric hoops of fire to get the sound edit on The Grocer’s Wife done. He and his sound editor, Ross Weber, drove from Vancouver to Montreal in Pozer’s k-car, loaded with ‘3,000 pounds’ of film materials. Pozer says he couldn’t see his colleague sitting beside him in the passenger seat. They did get to Montreal, with car suspension and springs blown, and set to work.

‘Living-room facility’

‘We did the sound edit in the living room of my one-bedroom apartment in Montreal – the living room was where the sound editor lived. We had to rent a little Steenbeck and turned our home into our post-production facility.’

Pozer said he moved to Montreal to take advantage of the nfb facilities there. ‘For us, most of pafps assistance initially came in the form of supplies, like junk leader. They also gave us some edit space. Eventually, I cashed in my pafps grant in exchange for a blowup (from 16mm to 35mm). They had given me a nominal grant originally, but when I argued for a blowup they gave it to me and that tripled the value of my grant.

‘We styled the whole production as a 35mm film. For example, we cut on 10-minute reels (as opposed to 20-minute on 16mm). We always had the hope to blow up to 35 without knowing how we would do it.’

‘I was amazed to see the nfb factory in Montreal. The nfb was great, they really supported the project.’

Pozer also got support from the private sector. ‘When we moved into this apartment in Montreal we had plumbing problems and our neighbor came down to our apartment. It was Christian Marcot, a sound editor. He laughed his head off at our `living-room facility.’ He was an incredible mentor. He helped us with the mixing sheets.’

In Toronto, Film House helped out as well. ‘They gave me the best quotes. I had been given very strong references to go with Peter Kelly, who has a soft spot for low-budget independent filmmakers. Film House really helped me with the sound and so did Peter.’

Pozer says The Michelle Apts., his current feature in production, is different. ‘We have more money, which means we have a different set of problems.’ For posting, Pozer has approached Film House’s Tom Berner (formerly of Film Arts) because ‘he seems to understand the importance of indigenous cinema in this country.’

Gary Popovich, an experimental filmmaker who is reputed as ‘the bathtub processor,’ has his own post-production resources. First is his approach to the entire posting stage, which involves looking at the stock he has shot, researching his subject further and then deciding what the film will become.

With his latest project, a look at Western cultural expansion called Fault Lines, Popovich is researching world history. ‘Now that I have all that footage, I have to analyze what I’ve done. I watch my footage over and over to see what the intuitive strands mean to me, then I start cutting.’

Cutting for Popovich means using his editing suite at home. He advises that ‘buying equipment is important to do experimental film. You need to build up your own little studio to do it.’

The bathtub enters the picture as a means to get to know the medium, says Popovich. ‘Film has a tactile quality about it and it’s a way of understanding the chemical makeup of film.’ Popovich says he has made ‘only a few films’ with the bathtub method and recently toured five cities in Western Canada to do bathtub process workshops.

Colin Strayer, producer of the award-winning short Efrom, says the film could not have been made without pafps. Private-sector support and community support were also essential, according to the sordid tale of Efrom’s birth as Strayer tells it.

‘pafps gave us 35mm editing space. The film was shot on 35mm ends from tv commercial houses and there wasn’t a complete role to work with. We’d get roles that were one-and-a-half minutes long. It was a real community effort, and most everyone except talent worked for free. PS Production Services’ Doug Dales donated the shooting equipment for a period of about a month, and Susan Shipton did about three-quarters of the editing on it for nothing, which is amazing considering what she could have charged.’

Originally, Efrom was completed at 41 minutes by June of 1991, when Strayer and director Keith Hlady took it to the Toronto Festival of Festivals. ‘The festival turned it down and we were faced with finishing it or going back and changing it. It was eight more months of editing and sound editing, and we cut it down to 23 minutes. We presented it to the festival again and they took it for the 1992 festival,’ says Strayer.

Strayer is still going to pafps for assistance with his own project, American Diner, which has been in production since 1988.

‘It’s an enormous road odyssey which began as an independent film about an American painter, John Baeder,’ explains Strayer. ‘Then I realized it was a much larger story and the film evolved into a feature-length story about roadside dining and then, as an offshoot, the story of diner architecture and diner icons developed.’

Strayer is presently cutting a half-hour bio of Baeder and aiming to have the feature, hosted by Dan Aykroyd, ready for next winter. ‘I have my own editing package, so for the most part, the nfb has provided lab work – processing, printing, sound transfers as well as some office facilities. They have provided an enormous amount of lab work. I couldn’t make my film without the pafps program.’

Adam Giolfi is an animator who made his 27-minute children’s fantasy, Attic in the Blue, in his parents’ garage and his brother’s basement. The film was completed without any assistance from agencies or councils on a budget of $13,000. Giolfi went to pafps for posting.

‘We were looking for post-production assistance and we went to the Ontario Arts Council first. They weren’t sure about the film so we went to the nfb and they gave us the space to do the edit and sound edit. They also did the mix. It took 10 months to shoot and another year in post.’

Giolfi had budgeted for some posting costs, but when pafps came on side, he put the money toward sending the film to film festivals around the world. ‘It has played at about 14 international festivals – from Cairo to Leeds and now it’s on its way to the Adelaide Children’s Film and Video Festival,’ Giolfi says. And it garnered three international awards along the way.

When you think about it, it’s amazing that these and other independent films ever get started given the arduous odyssey of seeing them through to completion, never mind getting them screened and, finally, recognized at international festivals.