A Fierce Green Fire - History of the ECO Movement at ZAP

ZAP STOKES KITCHELL'S
FIERCE GREEN FIRE

Mark Kitchell's new ambitious documentary series, a history of the environmental movement from "Silent Spring" and the Sierra Club through Love Canal, Greenpeace and the current global warming consciousness is in the fine cut stage here in the Presidio. ZAP has been providing the filmmakers with exotic solutions to the problems that come with integrating media from over 4 decades and six continents. Up-rezzing and improving archival video and general post production advice.

Mark is best known for Berkeley in the Sixties, which won top honors and has become a well-loved classic, one of the defining documentaries about the protest movements that shook America during the 1960s. I've known Mark for several years; I was one of many who helped prep 16mm footage for his "Berkeley In The 60's" when I worked for a time at an independent film studio on Mission Street in the mid 1980s. Then, in 2000 when I was preparing documentary shorts for "The Godfather" on DVD for Paramount, I was filming the great production designer Dean Tavoularis on the Lower East Side talking about the Sixth Street location for The Godfather, Part II (filmed in 1973). I was remarking that there was no "behind the scenes" footage of the original photography, and Dean said "too bad you can't find that kid's student film....by Mark something or other, skinny tall kid, long hair...NYU film student I think..." That led me to Mark Kitchell, and his great student film "The Godfather Comes to Sixth Street" from which we licensed clips for our documentary short.

Here is a synopsis of the project from the Fierce Green Fire website:

A Fierce Green Fire is the first film to take on environmentalism as a whole, to bring together all the parts and eras, from conservation to climate change. It explores how the issues built into an international cause, the largest movement the world has ever seen and perhaps the most crucial in terms of what’s at stake. It’s not easy being green – every battle is against the odds. We focus on successes: halting dams in the Grand Canyon; rescuing the people of Love Canal; saving whales and the greatest rainforest on earth. However, we also look at how the struggles continue and the issues grow in scope until it’s an open question whether they’re too big for the environmental movement to deal with. Our approach differs from the usual environmental documentary in two ways. First is our focus on activism. We reveal the issues by showing how people acted on them; it’s a more engaging approach, emphasizing drama and passion. Second is our emphasis on the big picture – connections, core ideas, what it all means. This film is designed to reach and teach a huge and hungry audience, give them an understanding of environmentalism like nothing before. Now we must all be environmentalists, as Bob Bullard the environmental justice advocate puts it: “There’s no Hispanic air. There’s no African-American air. There’s air! And if you breathe air – and most people I know do breathe air... then I would consider you an environmentalist.” A Fierce Green Fire unfolds in five acts, each 20-25 minutes. E.O. Wilson, the biologist and advisor to the film, suggested focusing on five of the most dramatic and important events and people. In developing those main stories and characters, we discovered each was emblematic of an era and a part of the environmental movement. So we devised an hourglass structure for each act. They begin with the broader context. Then they focus in on the main story, more fully told. Finally they open up again to explore ramifications.erke

Manifest Destiny - A History of American Foreign Policy from Lucasfilm

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Was the United States a beacon of freedom or an emerging imperialist power? A new 3-part documentary series from the same Lucasfilm-JAK Films documentary unit that produced ninety four one-hour history documentaries for young people asks fundamental questions of American identity and its role in the world of nations since the early eighteenth century. Going from advocacy of democracy to containment, through the emergence of the US as a world power after the first world war to world superpower during the cold war and finally the world's only superpower.

ZAP was brought in to provide on-line post production including HD conforming, color grading, title design and animation.

This ground-breaking series revisits our foreign involvments and adventures throughout our history: Cuba and Spain, The Philippines, Mexico, Vietnam, Somalia, the Former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American Historical Association got a sneak preview of epsode one earlier this year:

Broadening our vision.... to the Philippines, indeed taking in the Westward Movement on the North American continent and the whole Pacific region, is the first public screening (a world premiere!) of a just-completed Lucasfilm production, Manifest Destiny: To Conquer or Redeem. Directed and produced by Sharon Wood, the film tells the powerful story of the Spanish-American and U.S.-Philippine Wars in the context of continental expansion and conquest. As part one of Manifest Destiny, which will be a three-part series on U.S. foreign policy, this film tracks the evolving role of “American Exceptionalism” as the United States grew from a rebellious colony into a continental power and began to develop an overseas empire. Utilizing some remarkable historic footage and revisionist approach, it’s a work that guarantees you’ll never again see William McKinley as a kind of innocent victim of circumstances.

The three films all create linear worlds in which ambiguity is downplayed and the argument or story is made as clear as possible given the available evidence.

Race to Nowhere on track at ZAP

ZAP is helping Bay Area first-time filmmaker Vicki Abeles get her documentary feature "Race to Nowhere" finalized for HD screenings and for DVD release.

Race To Nowhere is a groundbreaking documentary film that examines education, childhood and the unintended consequences of the achievement-obsessed way of life that permeates American education and culture. Unrelenting pressure, whether from well-intentioned parents, teachers, national leaders or from children themselves, is creating a generation suffering from unprecedented levels of stress, depression and burnout.

Vicki Abeles, a mother of three and former corporate attorney, found herself questioning the changes she saw in her children as they navigated days filled with school, homework, tutoring and extracurricular activities. After a series of wake-up calls in her family and community, including the suicide of a young girl, Vicki set out to discover why children’s lives more closely resemble high-powered CEOs' than the relaxed, carefree lives of children from the past.

The filmmakers take viewers to schools across the country, featuring the stories of students who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried that students aren’t learning anything substantive and college professors and business leaders concerned that incoming young people lack the skills needed to succeed in our complex times.

Race To Nowhere is a call to families, educators, experts and policy makers to examine current assumptions on how to prepare our national youth to become the healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens of the next century.

ZAP Posts Documentary on the History of the Global Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Occasionally, we have an opportunity to become involved with a film who's subject is so compelling that we drop everything to jump in. Clarity Films "Have You Heard From Johannesburg: The Bottom Line" is one.

The film will premiere at the British Film Institute's 53rd London International Film Festival at the end of October. ZAP is providing HD post production facilities for their final push.

Here is a synopsis from the London Film Festival's site:

Have You Heard From Johannesburg: The Bottom Line

As the British anti-apartheid movement celebrates it 50th birthday, a look at how grass roots movements mobilised during the 80s to enforce economic sanctions on South Africa.

2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the British anti-apartheid movement, and in timely fashion documentary maker Connie Field (who directed the memorable The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter and Freedom on My Mind) is working on a series of films which tell the story of the global anti-apartheid activity. The Bottom Line explores the role of money, specifically how grass-roots organisations mobilised to cut the South African government off from their financial allies in the West. Through a widely-sourced collection of archive material, Field charts the history of the power of collective action, which culminated in a number of major companies withdrawing from South Africa during the 1980s. From the employees of Polaroid and General Motors in the USA to the massed ranks of British protestors boycotting Shell and withdrawing their money from Barclays Bank, all refuse to let it be business as usual with the repressive regime. Interviews with the key players, including British activists and senior figures in UK-based banks, add fascinating insights into just how effective the economic isolation of South Africa was.

Sandra Hebron

http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/films/world_cinema/405

Tarkovsky by Trakovsky

Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский

Our latest project literally walked in off the street one day.

A recent UC Santa Cruz graduate, a Russian American kid named Dmitry called one afternoon recently to ask for advice. He wanted to know how to get his film post produced and into film festivals. [Oh god, not another film student first-time filmmaker...looking for free advice, somehow always available.] Time for tough love. "Forget it...don't bother...don't waste my time."

Except.

This kid wasn't calling about a hypothetical film. He'd actually already gone out and spent a year shooting, editing, and writing and recording his voiceover and made a perfectly presentable DVD screener...with original cover art. I was impressed. Dmitry takes us on a mission to learn who Tarkovksy is, and what the filmmaker meant when he asked in his long long films if death really exists.

And get this...he's not even a film student. Former pre-med.

So I watched [selectively] his screener, and we figured out what else needed to be done to raise it to the next professional level. Oh and I'm a UCSC alum too, and I am 75% Russian-American. But I freely admitted to Dmitry that Solaris put me to sleep when I first saw it when I worked as a projectionist in an arthouse cinema in the early 70s. (I liked Space Oddity more) And I had a hard time with Andrei Rublev when I got around to watching it in the 90s.

The new 90 minute film is called "Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky..." ballsy title considering that Tarkovsky died when young Dmitry was just 1.

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (the filmmaker's site)

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=34

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=164